The twin birth of fieldwork

One of the enduring cultural products of the British experience of the Middle East in the nineteenth century was the travel book. In the early part of the century, before Thomas Cook and the P & O put ‘exotic’ travel within reach of romantics and dilettantes, the book of travels was primarily a scientific tome. Early British travelogues on Iran, written by the likes of William Price and James Morier, contained learned digressions on languages and dialects, ancient and modern history, archaeology, current affairs, and, occasionally, hints of fashionable new sciences such as geology.Footnote ¹ In some cases, their encyclopaedic tendencies stretched to religions, providing data for the foundation of the great Victorian discipline of comparative religion. In reflection of the observational techniques of the new sciences, the emergence of an epistemology of ‘fieldwork’ – of having personally been and seen – lent the traveller a new place among the learned, whence his opinions could be heard. This is not to overlook the contributions of early modern travellers to European knowledge of the world, but to draw attention to the newer phenomenon of the scholar as traveller himself.Footnote ² As a result, Asian society began to look different, taking on distinct and increasingly detailed form. It was the travelling rather than the armchair scholar who broke down the centuries-old image of the monolithic ‘Turke’ or ‘heathen’ and replaced it with a dazzling new picture of an Orient teeming with antique sects and schisms. The timing of this recognition of plurality was no coincidence: the acknowledgement, emancipation, and subsequent explosion of religious difference were among the defining characteristics of British society in the early nineteenth century. These changes at home were echoed in a new sensibility abroad that actively questioned old assumptions of an undifferentiated Islam. Sir John Malcolm (1769–1833) is the great example. In the years after his embassy to Iran of 1800, he included as the twentieth chapter of his bestselling History of Persia the first detailed account of the Muslim ‘sects’ of Iran, not only the ‘Soonees’ and ‘Sheahs’ but also discussing for the first time in any detail the ‘Soofies’ as well.Footnote ³ From roots in the memoirs of such travelling scholars there developed in Britain one of the most characteristically nineteenth-century forms of knowledge: ethnography. But between the age of Malcolm and the founding ethnologists such as E. B. Tylor lay the century’s long Romantic adolescence, during which the traveller acquired new cultural capital – no longer the second son sent off in travail but now the heroic leading man. For all the gravitas of its Greek title, ethnology shimmered with the glamour with which (in Kinglake’s memorable words) the Romantics had gilded ‘the Splendour and Havoc of The East’.Footnote ⁴ Young men who had grown up on the infantilized Romanticism of Victorian books for boys could now carry their adventures into intellectual maturity. The ethnologist – and his heir in Malinowski’s field-working anthropologist – was the scholar as hero, a hero who, for all his interest in other cultures, was of older, self-aggrandizing stock. Malcolm, Kinglake, Malinowski: taken as types they illustrate an enduring (one is tempted to say Odyssean) myth of the West: the European as discover of the world.

Yet there were also Asians present at the mythological dawn of ethnography; and, what is more, they had their notebooks at the ready. The same period that gave birth to the modern European scholar as traveller saw the creation of a parallel literature of travel and knowledge in the languages of the Middle East. This literature (and the epistemological observations and experiences underlying it) grew out of the same historical conditions as those that produced its English counterparts. Simply put, the confluence of commercial, diplomatic, and technological conditions that placed European scholars in Iran also placed Iranian scholars in Europe.

This correspondence was not in all cases wrought by the inequalities of empire. Previous work on such travellers, especially research on those from regions under British control, has argued that Asian knowledge of Europe (what Juan Cole has termed ‘Occidentalism’) was ‘an extension of the Western power to shape things’.Footnote ⁵ For too long this approach has inflated our picture of the cognitive manipulations of European power.Footnote ⁶ This article aims to move forward the debate on travel-as-knowledge by moving to a perspective of methodological individualism, looking at the human scale on which larger abstract formations such as Orientalism/Occidentalism were later created. Through a micro-historical reconstruction of a specific case of Asian ‘fieldwork’ in England, the focus turns towards experience rather than discourse. While it is true that the academic discipline of anthropology developed first in Europe, I argue that ‘fieldwork’ as such was more widespread, emerging from multiple acts of investigation by (in the present case) Iranian as well as British scholar-travellers.Footnote ⁷ It is in this epistemological and interactive sense that the terms ‘ethnography’ and ‘fieldwork’ are used, the former pointing to a body of writing and the latter to the observations and experiences on which it relies. The article uses these terms to frame the activities of early nineteenth-century Asian no less than European travellers, in an attempt to release the historicity of knowledge-making from the Foucauldian prisons of ‘discourse’.

By focusing on the early nineteenth century, the intention is to isolate a key moment at which European and Middle Eastern scholars began to describe one another’s societies in what can be described as a scientific and ethnographic (rather than literary and commercial) mode. The article uses an Iranian case study to illustrate this reciprocity because, as embassy matched embassy in the early nineteenth century, each was equipped with its scholarly retinue of British and Iranian men of the pen.Footnote ⁸ The main body of the paper reconstructs the British ‘fieldwork’ of one such Iranian, who recorded his experiences in a lengthy set of Persian field notes intended for circulation among the new savants sponsored by the crown prince, ‘Abbas Mirza (1789–1833). Between 1815 and 1819 this scholar-traveller, Mirza Salih Shirazi (d. after 1841), spent four years immersing himself in the language, mores, and machinery of ‘Inglistan’, the England that was catching the imagination of his countrymen no less rapidly than Iran was captivating England through the writings of his personal friend, Sir John Malcolm.Footnote ⁹ Although Salih wrote in detail on all aspects of English life – from fancy-dress balls and table manners to librarianship and the political culture of the parliament – the focus here is on his fulfilment of the same tropes as European ethnography of the period by way of a research tour of the provinces and a description of the religious sects and schisms that he encountered there.

Salih was a member of the new cadre of bureaucrats and scholars sponsored by the Qajar heir-apparent, ‘Abbas Mirza. In 1815, he became one of four young Iranian scholars sent to study the ‘new science’ (ma‘lumat-i jadid) in England.Footnote ¹⁰ Their Wanderjahren constituted an intellectual exchange visit in a very real sense, a reciprocity made possible by the ambassadorial exchange of Abu al-Hasan Khan to England in 1809–10 and of Sir Gore Ouseley to Iran in 1810–12.Footnote ¹¹ As a young civil servant or mirza, Salih had himself accompanied the Ouseley embassy for part of its journey, composing for the Englishmen one of the earliest examples of a classic ethnographic genre: the book of native phrases.Footnote ¹² As he trained the members of the embassy in the ways of his own country – largely unexplored by Iranians themselves – he himself learned the skills of the ethnographer. In the reciprocal founding moment of his career, he then wrote a description of his own land that foreshadowed both his own account of England and other subsequent ‘internal’ ethnographies of Iran.Footnote ¹³

Salih was part of a generation of self-consciously new intellectuals nurtured by Prince ‘Abbas Mirza in the face of an expansive Russian empire. In view of the practical and typically mechanical orientation of their learning, we should regard these intellectuals as men of science. Some studied engineering and mathematics, others weapons technology; some physiology and medicine, others ironworking and printing; and some (as in Salih’s case) foreign languages and customs.Footnote ¹⁴ It seems reasonable to suggest an epistemological connection between their scientific and ethnographic interests. Their mechanical training imbued them with a model of learning through observation (even imitation) that was quite distinct from either the theological dogma or philosophical speculation of the traditional Iranian savant. Salih himself belonged to this new generation: as well as an ethnographer he was a trained printer, who learned through observing the actions of his machine-working master.Footnote ¹⁵ In England, and later in Russia and France, he similarly observed the operation of textile factories and glassworks, iron foundries, and paper mills. Fieldwork emerged as part of this wider ‘scientific’ attitude, an attitude that enabled Salih and the other new savants to mix and learn freely with their British counterparts.

In the years after their return from England in 1819, Salih and his travelling companions stood at the centre of a circle that sought to use its new learning to transform Iran, both domestically and in relation to its neighbours.Footnote ¹⁶ One companion, Mirza Riza, wrote a Persian history of Napoleon; another, Mirza Ja‘far, became the country’s chief engineer (muhandis bashi) and in 1847 printed Khulasat al-Hisab, a textbook on mathematics.Footnote ¹⁷ Their foreign-found knowledge was channelled back into Iranian society. After his own return to Iran, Salih used his knowledge of European ways on a series of foreign missions and negotiations, as well as in his role as official state translator (mutarjim-i dawlat). As was true for European states in the age of colonial expansion, ethnography in Iran emerged as a fillip of foreign policy. Like the writings of such English travellers as Malcolm and Price, this was ethnography with links to the state.

Travel was nonetheless key to the dissemination of ethnography and the other ‘new sciences’ in Iran. With the emergence of this new mode of scientific travel, the genre of the Persian travelogue itself began to change. While early modern genres of Arabo-Persian travel writing certainly paved the way, there were important differences in the travelogues of the 1800s.Footnote ¹⁸ The safarnama texts composed for the new savants were less the moralizing, idiosyncratic, and belle-lettrist documents of earlier tradition and more deliberate, technical, and systematic works. They no longer belonged to a spiritually aestheticized discourse of ‘journeying and wayfaring’ (sayr-u-safar) and, while elements lingered of the old lure of ‘wonders’ (‘aja’ib), the new thrust was towards observing the practical rather than the perplexing. This was echoed in the development of a sparer and more efficient prose style, open to the intrusions of loan-words and suited to the description of mechanical no less than religious practices.Footnote ¹⁹ The format of Salih’s diary was thus paralleled by that of another travelling civil servant, Mirza Mustafa Afshar, whose 1830 account of Russia contained similar sections on the peoples, languages, museums, politics, and industries, no less than the religions, of the Rus.Footnote ²⁰ The writing of such travel diaries was central to the scientific ventures of ‘Abbas Mirza’s circle. Intended on the travellers' return for distribution among this group of new men of the world such travelogues were formal requirements of what were sponsored expeditions rather than private meanderings.

The concern with religion on which this article focuses was thus part of a pattern of the larger, systematic observation of European societies. It belonged to the same emergent epistemology of observation and description, examining religious activities no less than other manners and customs. This observational praxis afforded the new recognition of complexity and plurality that we have described, allowing Iranians to break down the monolithic image of the Christian masihi at the same time that British travellers described the various ‘sects’ of Islam. Such knowledge of the different Christian denominations became important in the years after 1811, when the Revd Henry Martyn opened Iran to the European and American missionary societies. Far from purposeless exotica, Salih’s ethnography helped the men of his government circle to understand the backgrounds and motivations of the foreign missionaries who were arriving in Iran with their new ideas of translated scripture and female education. As with the functional character of European ethnography, its Iranian counterpart was intended to make both profit and sense of the swifter Eurasian interactions that accompanied the new century.

While much has been written about the interest of Europeans in the religious minorities of Asia during the nineteenth century, the corresponding efforts of Asian scholars to make sense of the diversity of European religious life have been largely overlooked. Since Salih was closely acquainted with the main British knowledge-producers on Iran – from Malcolm, Price, and Morier to the Ouseley brothers and the Oxbridge Orientalists Samuel Lee and John Macbride – his own knowledge-gathering should be seen as part of a reciprocal exercise.Footnote ²¹ Not only was he the first Iranian to write about such Dissenting groups as the Unitarians and Methodists, he was also writing about the religious minorities of England at a time when only a handful of English savants knew of the ‘Sheahs’ or ‘Soofies’ of Iran.Footnote ²² Salih’s notebooks record the Iranian side of an ethnographical dialogue made possible by the new global mobility that affected Iranian no less than English scholars in the early 1800s.Footnote ²³

In the first moments of Iran and Britain’s direct knowledge of one another lay an intellectual reciprocity of considerable congruence in the activities of these travelling savants. Between Salih’s Persian diary and the English records of his visit, we find evidence aplenty of the visitors’ immersion and interaction with members of the native sects that made up England’s fracturing religious landscape in the early nineteenth century. For, after three years in England, in 1818 Salih made a tour of the English West Country in the company of Mirza Ja‘far, who was studying engineering at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. Enough of distractions, then: let us turn to the thick description by reconstructing the details of Salih and Ja‘far’s ‘fieldwork’.

Into darkest Gloucestershire

Directly after Salih and Ja‘far visited Oxford University in October 1818, they travelled to Cheltenham, a town that was becoming a haven for Persian-speaking East India men on their return from Asia. In Oxford, they had toured the Bodleian Library and conversed with the university’s leading Arabist, John David Macbride (1778–1868).Footnote ²⁴ They would have left Oxford on the Cheltenham or ‘Isis’ coach, which departed from the city’s Angel Inn and arrived in Cheltenham at the Plough Hotel.Footnote ²⁵ Advertisements for the coaches leaving the Angel Inn (including running times) were published most days in the Oxford newspapers, particularly the main weekly newspaper, Jackson’s Oxford Journal. With the keen interest in newspapers that crops up repeatedly in his diary, Salih would have found such local knowledge easy to gather. Indeed, in the week when the Iranians were in Oxford an advertisement for the Angel Inn (offering ‘accommodation inferior to none’) and the times of the daily Cheltenham coach running from there appeared in Jackson’s Oxford Journal.Footnote ²⁶ By 1818, Salih had fully mastered the English language, having earlier retreated to the small town of Croydon to immerse himself in a nine-month course of private language lessons with a provincial scholar, the Revd John Bissett (d. 1852), his first major native informant.Footnote ²⁷

Ready to explore what was to their compatriots complete terra incognita, Salih recorded that in Cheltenham he and Ja‘far spent the night in an inn (perhaps the Plough), before the next day continuing their journey to Bath.Footnote ²⁸ There they met the diplomat and future author of the famous Hajji Baba novels, James Morier (1782–1849), the literary lampooner of an ‘imaginary’ Iranian’s tours of England thus featuring in the field notes of a very real Iranian.Footnote ²⁹ Salih was too fond of his British subjects to have made a pre-emptive strike at Morier, who seems to have partly based his novels on a fellow-traveller and friend of Salih’s with the name Hajji Baba.Footnote ³⁰ The visit had an amicably reciprocal motive, however, since Morier had served on the Ouseley embassy to Iran that Salih had also accompanied. They were already old acquaintances, who would each in some form come to write of one another.

It was not until the Iranians left the genteel settings of Bath for the more ethnographically diverse region around Gloucester and Bristol that they came into contact with the fissiparous sects of the West Country. This is not hyperbole: the combined economy and geography of the steep valleys of Gloucestershire reared a culture of independent-minded millers among whom Dissent had long flourished.Footnote ³¹ On 17 October 1818, Salih and Ja‘far first entered this world by paying a visit to one of the silk mills in the valleys around Gloucester.Footnote ³² In one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution, the travellers were entering the circles of West Country silk and cotton weavers, which had been hotbeds of Dissent for two centuries. Leaving Bath for Gloucester by coach, they would have travelled on the Bath–Gloucester toll road that opened in 1780. Since the road passed through the industrial villages of Nailsworth and Stroud, it was at one of these sites that they visited the silk mills that Salih described in his diary entry for that day.Footnote ³³ They did things differently here, at work and prayer, for Nailsworth and Stroud were Baptist and Quaker centres. The Iranians were entering Dissenter country and over the coming weeks would interview the members of these unknown sects.

After visiting the mills, later the same day the Iranians entered the city of Gloucester, a visit recorded in both Salih’s diary and the Gloucester Herald newspaper. In the former, Salih noted them making the acquaintance of a ‘holy and ascetic woman’ who belonged to a sect called ‘Methodists’ (the name transcribed from the English).Footnote ³⁴ In view of the fact that, until around 1850, Methodists were something of a rarity in the West Country, the Iranians were tapping into what in 1818 was only a nascent movement in Gloucester. The woman they met – a Miss Bleechley – asked Salih and Ja‘far to read to her in English from the Bible, an activity in which they joined with all the vigour of the participant-observer.Footnote ³⁵ As any fieldworker soon learns, though, the implications of this kind of cultural immersion are all too predictable, and, from the evidence of Salih’s diary, Miss Bleechley subsequently made an attempt to convert the two travellers to Christianity (and of a Methodist kind at that). After some awkward explanations, Miss Bleechley let up on her efforts and invited the two strangers to her house for supper (a pioneering instance perhaps of proselytizing ‘flirty fishing’). Happily, there they found themselves in the company of a group of young and unaccompanied women and Salih recorded them staying gossiping and laughing till one in the morning.Footnote ³⁶ It is a charming image, reversal that it is of Malinowski among the sultry and easy-going maidens of the Pacific.

The next day, Miss Bleechley took her new friends to visit the great cathedral in Gloucester, a city with whose resonance in English history Salih was familiar from the detailed historical studies that he carefully redacted into his diary. With its Saxon origins, its carved pagan vestiges by way of green men and unicorns, its place in the ancient mythology of Albion, the cathedral struck Salih’s imagination sharply. Gloucester cathedral was a vestige of a very different England from the neo-classical townscapes in which he had largely moved to this point, a more archaic and autochthonous England than that of the calm Grecian colonnades of Cheltenham and Bath. Speaking of the Iranians’ visit to the cathedral, the Gloucester Herald noted how ‘the sublime and beautiful architecture of the holy pile appeared to impress them with reverence for its pious use’.Footnote ³⁷ Salih himself jotted down data on its history, such as the fact that several of England’s kings lay buried there and that its ‘chief priest’ or bishap was one of England’s twenty-four such ‘masters of the faith’.Footnote ³⁸ After touring the cathedral, the travellers were introduced to the Bishop of Gloucester and fulfilled their ethnographic duties by interviewing the master of ritual. The prelate in question was the Honourable Henry Ryder DD, in cathedra from 1815 to 1824, who, in reflection of Miss Bleechey’s ‘enthusiasm’, was the first Evangelical appointed to an English episcopal see.Footnote ³⁹ Salih was far from overawed with the bishop, and described him as a mean and short, if good-mannered, man.Footnote ⁴⁰ Perhaps the ill impression came from Ryder’s attitude to his ‘heathen’ visitors, for, when a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in Gloucester in 1812, Ryder was one of its chief supporters. We may suppose that he gave his Muslim guests a fair lecture on the merits of Christianity. It was, after all, only a few years since the evangelicals had sent the missionary Henry Martyn (1781–1812) to Iran, and less than a year later Salih himself would be apprenticed to the Bible Society’s oriental Bible printer on Fleet Street.Footnote ⁴¹ So deeply immersed in the native culture, Salih was in danger of being washed away from his own. Such were the cultural compromises the travellers had to make in order to access the local knowledge that they termed the ‘new science’.

Back in Gloucester, Miss Bleechley next took the travellers to visit the county gaol, so introducing them to one of the more peculiar pastimes to emerge from Georgian England’s religious revival, which, from the Wesleys onwards, saw pietists and the plain curious pay tours to the imprisoned. The effect on the Iranians was not quite as Miss Bleechley intended, since, rather than pitying the poor criminals, Salih noted his pleasant surprise at the clean private cells they were given and their regular periods of exercise outdoors, conditions that (in a reflexive moment) he compared favourably with his own expectations of a criminal’s lot.Footnote ⁴²

Bluestockings and Bible classes

Taking leave of their female informant, Ja‘far and Salih next took a coach to Bristol. Here, a world away from the ‘madrasas’ that Salih had described less than a week earlier in Oxford, they spent a long day touring the bottle and crystal factories and the ironworks of the mechanical modernity that they had been sent to England to investigate but from which they had been distracted by their interest in the religions of the provinces.Footnote ⁴³ Shortly after arriving in Bristol, the students were told by their host – Ja‘far’s teacher from the Royal Military Academy, Dr Olinthus Gregory (1774–1841) – about another learned and religious woman, who lived in the hamlet of Barley Wood, some twelve miles outside Bristol.Footnote ⁴⁴ At a time when Iranian travellers were beginning to take an interest in English women that was at times no more healthy than the oriental fantasies of their European counterparts, Hannah More (1745–1833) is the most interesting Englishwoman to appear in Salih’s travelogue.Footnote ⁴⁵ A habituée of London’s theatrical circles in her youth, Hannah gradually turned away from a successful career as a dramatist and poet to write ‘useful’ literature, becoming one of the first to earn the new nickname of ‘bluestocking’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Despite the social activism of her middle years, she never lost the skills she had developed in writing for the stage and, in addition to her lengthy tomes on girls’ education and conformist ‘village politics’, produced a vast number of moralizing tracts; one biographer puts their number at no fewer than 114.Footnote ⁴⁷ As a close friend of William Wilberforce and the same Bishop of Gloucester whom the Iranians had just met, Hannah More was also a leading Evangelical, her efforts mainly directed to bringing the light of Christian education to the rural West Country.Footnote ⁴⁸ Like many a European ethnographer in Africa and Asia, the Iranians’ trip to the English countryside was thus in the company of a local promoter of literacy and religious conformity, two further processes whose global contemporaneousness has been overlooked.

For all the missionary competitiveness that the new global contacts of the nineteenth century would muster, Salih’s encounters with Evangelicals did not push him towards querulous or defensive opinions. His eyes were open to the merits of the Christians and he was impressed with Miss More, noting that she had written and published a number of her own books and was visited by everyone of importance passing through the area. This was quite so: among other noted visitors, both Wordsworth and Coleridge had visited her a few years before Ja‘far and Salih, who thus trod a distinguished trail to her door.Footnote ⁴⁹ Estimating Hannah’s age as seventy years (she was in fact seventy-three), Salih recorded that she lived with her sister (who was to die within months of their visit), surrounded by hills, flowers, and or odiferous herbs. This was deep country, quite literally off the map of Iranian geographical knowledge. In a sense that is no less real than for European travellers in Iran during these same years, Salih and Ja‘far were explorers of ‘unknown’ terrain.

The Iranians spent two hours in conversation with Hannah More. When she asked them about their own faith, in model reciprocity they explained to her the principles of Islam. In his diary, Salih recorded how, on taking his leave, Hannah presented him with one of her books on the subject of god-fearing piety or taqwa, in which she wrote a dedication for him. Transcribing the words from English, he noted its title: Practical piety.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hannah More herself recorded an account of what, even by her standards, was an unusual pair of guests, a memoir paraphrased in the 1830s by her biographer William Roberts. As an example of the reciprocity of the ethnographic encounter, it is worth quoting at some length:

Hannah and her biographer’s depiction of the meeting offers an invaluable comparison to Salih’s own account, confirming the latter’s details and offering further particulars of its own. It is by no means certain that the Iranians’ offer to publish Hannah’s book on their return home was anything more than Iranian ta‘aruf or ‘politesse’, offered to a woman who was clearly an enthusiastic champion of her own causes. In any case, no such translation or publication is known to have appeared, even though printed translations of English works did follow in the wake of Salih’s and later travellers’ return to Iran (as reciprocal translations followed the return of British scholars from Iran, such as Salih’s friend William Ouseley).Footnote ⁵² One convincing element in Hannah’s account is the Iranians’ claim to have read the Bible, for the picture provided in Salih’s travel diary of the nature of the education given to the students in England has a distinctly Christianizing character, despite the fact that they had been sent by their royal master in search of scientific knowledge. But Christianity and science were not yet separate: Ja‘far’s teacher Olinthus Gregory published pioneering works on mathematical engineering alongside a treatise in defence of the literal truth of scripture.Footnote ⁵³ England was no more the country of pure science that Iranians imagined it to be than Iran was the land of pure mysticism pictured by early nineteenth-century English readers of Hafiz. And yet the response of the Iranians to the English religious was in itself scientific: to observe and describe. They applied to the study of a foreign society the same learning techniques they were using to master the mechanical and industrial methods that they were studying.

Their choice of the books of Isaiah and Job is also interesting. Without reading too much into the matter (as Hannah herself certainly did!), the choice of these Old Testament prophets (both of whom were also revered by Muslims) may have been a strategic answer, the characteristic equivocation of the cornered fieldworker. For Hannah More assumed that the Iranians chose the Book of Isaiah through the prophesy it made (according to Christian doctrine) of the coming of Jesus as the Messiah. What she was clearly not aware of was that, in Muslim tradition, Isaiah chapter 42 is regarded as a prediction not of the coming of Jesus but of Muhammad, the last prophet. In discussion with this fervent believer who, as a supporter of the Bible Society and other missionary organizations, was evidently keen to see signs of Christian faith in her Muslim guests, it seems that the Iranians managed to hoodwink Hannah with a clever answer. It is up to us whether we see their reply as the ‘pious dissimulation’ or taqiyya in which Shi‘ites may engage to protect their faith under difficult circumstances or simply as a smart joke about which the travellers enjoyed laughing as they walked away down Hannah’s garden path.

The gift of the book Practical piety also deserves attention, in that it lends direct insight into the readings that further informed Salih’s understanding of English religion. It is of little surprise that it was a copy of this book that Hannah had to hand: Practical piety was one of her most successful works, going through ten editions within the first few years of its publication in 1811.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although, like other texts of the Evangelical Awakening, Practical piety emphasized the inward cultivation of devotion over the external forms of ritual, its main focus was on the ‘practical’ application of piety in the world through the kind of social activism of which Hannah More was a prime organizer.Footnote ⁵⁵ As More explained, ‘Practical Christianity then, is the actual operation of Christian principles’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Salih’s possession of this book is therefore evidence for his awareness of English ideas of religion turned towards the practical common good. As such, it represents some of the earliest documentation for the transmission of ideas of reformed and this-worldly piety between Christians and Muslims.Footnote ⁵⁷ As in Europe, fieldwork abroad brought home new ideas on religion that fed into domestic conceptions of the religion of oneself as well as of others. For Iran, which would acquire much more of this ideology through later travelling intellectuals such as Jamal al-din ‘al-Afghani’ (d. 1897) and Mirza Malkum Khan (d. 1908), it is probably the earliest evidence of its kind. But what is important here is the two-way traffic of ideas (indeed of actual books) in the early 1800s that paved the way for larger social and intellectual interactions later in the century. For Practical piety formed the reciprocal counterpart to the two early nineteenth-century Shi‘ite theological works acquired by Salih’s friend Gore Ouseley and passed on to Salih’s Cambridge associate Professor Samuel Lee, who, in the preface to his study of them, acknowledged Salih’s help.Footnote ⁵⁸

There is no sign in Salih’s travelogue that he was particularly religious himself – he never mentions praying, let alone fasting, and was a keen tippler of imported champagne.Footnote ⁵⁹ But the understanding he was formulating of his own culture during his years of travel seems to have been a distinctly modern one, which lay in harmony with his wider opinions on the proper order of society and knowledge. Just as European religion – indeed, the very notion of religions in the plural – emerged from increased contact with the wider world, so in the experience of Salih and others like him we see a changing of attitudes towards ‘religion’ in Asia.Footnote ⁶⁰ In Iran, this would culminate in the declaration of tolerance of Iran’s own religious minorities issued half a century later by the reformist prime minister Amir Kabir, a man whose own travelling career had seen him accompany Salih to Russia in 1830.Footnote ⁶¹

If Salih was impressed by the writings of Hannah More, it was through the affinity he found between her ideas and his own. Though Salih did not discuss his religious opinions in his diary, we have evidence for his inclinations towards the kind of practical piety to which Hannah exhorted her countrymen. A newspaper report from The Times of 7 December 1818 shows that Salih and Ja‘far were not merely silent observers of English religious life but voiced opinions of it, opinions that locals were keen to learn: on one occasion, for example, they ‘observed that the preaching in our churches was wholly mystical; and that in Persia, the reader of the mosque dwelt, in his exhortations to the people, on practical moral duties’.Footnote ⁶² On the evidence of this Iranian travelling and speaking among the English, Salih was anything but the stereotypical ‘mystical’ Persian whom European scholars depicted through the nineteenth century; on the contrary, the mystics were to be found in the parish churches of England. Recorded in England through a journalistic reversal of the familiar ethnographic encounter, Salih’s own voice turns the tropes of ‘Orientalist’ travel writing on their head.

In the same newspaper report, we also learn more about the travellers’ bookish investigations of the religious world of the Inglis. According to The Times, ‘Saleh … has read Paley’s Natural Theology; and both [Salih and Ja‘far] are curious in their inquiries as to this department of our literature, as well as that of ethics’.Footnote ⁶³ Here is further evidence of their close investigation into Anglican theology, this time not through the writings of a ‘bluestocking’ enthusiast but through a man whose work formed the orthodox heart of Anglican doctrine. At the same time as Orientalists such as William Ouseley were identifying the ‘key texts’ of Islam, here Salih was involved in precisely the same intellectual exercise.Footnote ⁶⁴ In less than three years between its appearance in 1802 and William Paley’s death in 1805, Natural theology passed through nine editions and quickly entered the standard undergraduate syllabus at Cambridge; it would have been an obvious book for Salih’s tutor, the Revd John Bissett (himself a Cambridge man), to recommend to him. Given that, for the best part of a century, Natural theology stood steady in England’s university syllabuses, Salih had chosen as good a book as any for unlocking ‘the English mind’. Over the course of twenty-seven chapters based on the observation of nature, Paley’s book pursued its famous analogy of the universe as pocket watch, the precision and elegance of whose design points the rational observer to the recognition of an intelligent divine ‘watchmaker’. Here was a ‘scientific’ theology whose method cohered neatly with Salih and Ja‘far’s primary interests in the mechanical sciences.

Bristol religiosa

After their trip to see Hannah More, Salih and Ja‘far returned to Bristol, where they spent five days in the company of a class with whom they were not yet familiar after three years in England: Bristol’s Quaker- and Unitarian-dominated merchant and trading class.Footnote ⁶⁵ Making friends with several such men, Salih penned a neat ethnographic sketch of the domestic style of the provincial bourgeoisie, describing a house with many rooms of fine furniture, paintings on the walls, and a pretty garden. The opportunity to investigate the domestic sphere came through an invitation from a Mistar Harfad, most probably John Scandrett Harford (1787–1866), who, along with his eponymous father, secured the family’s admission to the gentry.Footnote ⁶⁶ In addition to Mr Harford, Salih and Ja‘far also received invitations to call on physicians and other members of the Bristolian bourgeoisie. The latter were for their part flattered by the Iranians’ attentions, one article in a Bristol newspaper seeing fit to describe them as ‘Persian princes’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Here again, the newspaper report fills out the details of Salih’s diary, noting their tour of the Bristol Blind Asylum and its charitable hospital or Infirmary. At the latter, the report noted how ‘they seemed affected by the circumstance of a black man being among the patients; and being told that the institution embraced those of every nation and colour, observed that “this was true charity”’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Whether this black man was one of the slaves recently manumitted in Bristol is unclear but, given the city’s key role in the slave trade, it seems likely that this was so, his medical fees paid by the one of the ‘practically pious’ people involved in the abolitionist movement, who, like Hannah More, expressed their faith by tangible acts of charity.Footnote ⁶⁹Mathews Bristol guide of 1819 sheds more light on the matter, describing how ‘all persons, without regard to country, colour, or dialect, who are accidentally injured, are, on application, immediately admitted [to the hospital], without any recommendation whatsoever’.Footnote ⁷⁰Mathews also relates that the purpose of the other charitable institution they visited – the Asylum for the Indigent Blind on Lower Maudlin Street – was ‘to instruct the blind in some useful trade, by which they may be enabled to provide for their own maintenance’.Footnote ⁷¹ Clearly moved by his visit there, Salih recorded a conversation with a blind girl who earned her keep by working as a basket-maker.Footnote ⁷² (Mathews confirms Salih’s record, describing how fine and coarse baskets ‘are constantly on sale at the asylum’.Footnote ⁷³) Here in his Persian field notes was a reversal of the familiar ethnographic gaze at the blind beggars of Persia.

Meetings with mystics

After the travellers’ encounters with Anglicans such as Olinthus Gregory and John Bissett, and their more recent introduction to Methodism at the hands of Miss Bleechley, it was now the turn of the Unitarians to widen Salih and Ja‘far’s understanding of England’s religious life. Their first meeting with the Unitarians occurred in Bristol on 23 October 1818, when they were taken to visit what Salih termed a Unitarian kalisa or ‘church’.Footnote ⁷⁴ He described how, on entering it, he saw a man walk up to the pulpit and preach a sermon, on which cue he sat and listened, before being invited to speak to the preacher afterwards. He transcribed the preacher’s name as mistar row, who, it seems clear, was the Unitarian minister John Rowe (1764–1832).Footnote ⁷⁵ Having been brought up in Devon, Rowe settled in Bristol in 1798, taking up a position near the hustle and bustle of the quays at the Lewin’s Mead Chapel, which, as the main Unitarian meeting place in Bristol, was the ‘church’ at which Salih heard him preach.Footnote ⁷⁶ Since the earliest mention in the chapel records of it being a Unitarian rather than Presbyterian meeting place only occurred in 1816, the Iranians were visiting Lewin’s Mead early in its transition into an openly Unitarian centre. This reflected the fact that it had only been with the passing of the Unitarian Relief Act of 1813 that it had become legal to reject publicly the Anglican doctrine of the Trinity.Footnote ⁷⁷ Just as Salih’s friend Sir John Malcolm visited Iran in the years of the suppression of the ‘Soofies’, events recorded in his 1815 History of Persia, a few years later Salih was in turn experiencing England undergoing its own religious upheaval.

Unlike Iran’s ‘Soofies’ at the same time, the Unitarians were on the up. By the time Salih and Ja‘far visited it in 1818, the Lewin’s Mead Chapel was already an impressive building, fronted by four Ionic columns and a lofty pediment, which framed a portico to broad interior galleries supported by cast-iron pillars and illuminated by gas burners. According to Mathews, it was ‘a large, elegant, and costly place of worship, and may be ranked among the principal public buildings’ of Bristol.Footnote ⁷⁸ From the evidence of John Rowe’s sermons and publications, their host was rather less open-minded than Unitarians would later become through their exchanges with non-Christians. Two years earlier, in 1816, Rowe had published a tract consisting of A letter from an old Unitarian to a young Calvinist, which, though not written by himself, received his praise in the preface he wrote for it. The Letter featured the kind of characterization of Islam that, while common in English writings of the period, is not quite what one might expect of a Unitarian text. In no uncertain terms, it condemned the ‘holy zeal by which the religion of the imposter Mahomet was propagated over one third of the globe, involving mankind in ignorance, superstition, frenzy and barbarism’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Warming to its theme of the superiority of ‘rational’ Unitarians over ‘superstitious’ Muslims, the Letter claimed that

Further evidence of John Rowe’s ideas is found in his championing of rational religion in a sermon on the use of reason in understanding scripture, preached a year before meeting the Iranians.Footnote ⁸¹ Unfortunately, the sermons that he preached in the direct years after the meeting are not extant, so we cannot assess the impact of encountering what were perhaps surprisingly rational ‘Mahometans’. We are rather more fortunate in the case of the other Unitarian minister with whom Salih and Ja‘far spent time in Bristol. This was the Revd Dr Lant Carpenter (1780–1840), whom Salih described guiding them around the docks, factories, and ironworks of the city.Footnote ⁸² As the son of a carpet manufacturer from Kidderminster in the West Midlands, Carpenter was in his element leading the Iranians around factories, even though he had only moved to the city just over a year before their visit. Besides, the Lewin’s Mead Chapel of which he, along with Rowe, was custodian was located just next to the quayside and so an additional tour of the dockyards was convenient enough. The chapel was also close to Champion’s Brass Works, one of the biggest players in the old Bristol metal trade, and so there is a good chance that Champion’s was one of the brass works that Salih described.Footnote ⁸³ Seeing Dissenting religion in its muck and brass contexts, this was fieldwork indeed.

If such factories made up the social context in which Salih described Bristol’s Dissenters, he also took the opportunity to gather their opinions on religion and recorded them in his diary. Salih saw close similarities between Unitarian and Muslim doctrine. Having transcribed the name ‘Unitarian’ in his diary, Salih explained the designation by means of a literal translation of the term as muwahidin. He then added that these people regarded Jesus as a ‘messenger’ (that is, not as the incarnation of God) and that since Jesus’s death they had worshipped only God and not Jesus alongside him. Such ‘churches’ as theirs, he noted, were found all over England and were especially popular among the wise and enlightened. We also know a good deal about the ideas of Salih’s native informant, Lant Carpenter, who, over the course of thirty-eight books, greatly expanded the depth of what was still a nascent Unitarian theology. In line with the rationalizing origins of Unitarianism, Carpenter’s writings reflected the new critical spirit towards the historicity of the New Testament, albeit doing so to ultimately confirm the ‘genuineness’ of the Gospels.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the midst of the polemic regularly directed at Dissenters, Carpenter also sought to demonstrate the fidelity of Unitarian doctrine to the explicit word of Scripture, citing the Gospels as ‘plain and unambiguous’ proof that since ‘Jesus was not himself truly God’, true Christianity taught that it was only God and not Jesus who was to be worshipped.Footnote ⁸⁵ Given the precise coherence of Carpenter’s writings with Salih’s description of Unitarian doctrine, it seems likely that their conversations provided the basis for his account. Here was a Persian counterpart to the many nineteenth-century European accounts of the mystics of Persia.

Other Unitarian sermons preached around 1818 in the towns that Salih and Ja‘far visited lend further insight into the circle that they entered during their week in Bristol. Most useful are those of Joseph Hunter (1783–1861), a former cutler’s apprentice from Sheffield, who was active in Bath in the years surrounding their visit.Footnote ⁸⁶ One of the key themes of Hunter’s sermons (described by one contemporary as ‘sterling morality expressed in sterling English’) was the Unitarian claim to ‘rational views of religion’ and upholding the spirit of ‘civil and religious liberty’, a cause of which the Iranians’ host, Lant Carpenter, was also a supporter.Footnote ⁸⁷ Hunter’s rationalist ideas on religion were also shared by the sermons of other Unitarian preachers, such as W. J. Fox, who in a sermon of 1815 proclaimed that the promotion of free inquiry would diminish the religious controversies that divide humanity, for ‘the bigotry which estranges good men, of different opinions on religious subjects, from each other’s esteem and affection … will gradually retire as Free Inquiry advances’.Footnote ⁸⁸ In this sermon, preached in the year of the students’ arrival in England, we hear a vivid outline of the ideology of ‘progress’ that, in its Iranian guise under the term taraqqi, was perhaps the principal export that Salih and subsequent Iranian travellers brought back from their experiences abroad.Footnote ⁸⁹

The Unitarian connection with the science that Salih and Ja‘far had been sent to study can be seen in a speech delivered by Joseph Hunter to the Bath Literary and Philosophical Association in 1826. Hunter praised the contribution of Bath to the progress of science, regaling his audience with stories of such local scientists as Venner, Jorden, Cheyne, and the astronomer and discover of Uranus, Sir William Herschel (1738–1822), whom Salih would meet just after leaving Bristol in November 1818.Footnote ⁹⁰ It is important that we recognize the way in which Dissenters sought to accommodate the new discoveries of science. In so doing, their use of the new ideology of science to form a ‘rational religion’ found channels into Asia through conversations with such machine-minded men as the printer’s apprentice Salih and the engineering student Ja‘far. Such was Salih’s commitment to the new epistemology of observation that he took great pains to carry back to Iran one of the new metal, reflecting telescopes.Footnote ⁹¹

In a sermon preached in Bath less than a year after Salih and Ja‘far’s visit to the city, Joseph Hunter also turned to the topic of ‘Mahometanism’. Here we can trace the fieldworkers’ presence among the debates that followed their departure. For this was not the polemical disparaging of Islam associated with the local Unitarian preacher John Rowe a year before their visit. Instead, it was a balanced analytical comparison with Christianity, precisely the kind of comparative exercise in which Salih himself engaged by comparing Unitarian and Muslim theology. In Hunter’s 1819 Bath sermon, Islam was not presented as the ‘heathenism’ of old, but as a parallel monotheism through which, as with Christianity in Europe, in Asia ‘men came in general to receive the great truths of a Divine Creator and his providence’.Footnote ⁹² Hunter’s equanimous comparisons were the kind of radical cosmopolitanism that the more connected world of the early 1800s was making possible, through a new degree of contact between travelling intellectuals.

Hunter’s unusually tolerant vision of a divinely inspired Islam may just have been a knock-on effect of Salih and Ja‘far’s encounter with his Dissenting acquaintances in Bath and Bristol the previous year. But the connection may have been more direct, for, in Salih’s account of a second visit to Hunter’s home town of Bath, he described a visit to the Unitarian chapel there and a supper at the home of the chapel’s ‘priest’ (kashish).Footnote ⁹³ While the editor of Salih’s diary has transcribed the name of his host as Mistar Hasant, from the close orthographic similarity in Persian between Hunt and the untenable English name Hasant, and the fact that the only Unitarian chapel in Bath at this time was the same Trim Street chapel of which Joseph Hunter was the incumbent, it seems likely that Salih met Hunter and misremembered his name as Hunt. If so, the Iranian clearly left a good impression on Hunter; so much so that he wrote one of the era’s most ecumenical evaluations of Islam. Again, knowledge emerged through a reciprocal process: what Salih did for the Unitarians in his Persian field notes, a few months later Hunter did for the ‘Mahometans’ in his English sermon.

After Salih had supper with Joseph Hunter that night in Bath, his appreciation of Unitarian teachings grew richer. For, in Salih’s subsequent account of the Unitarians in the next paragraph of his diary, he deliberately chose the term ‘messenger’ or paighambar to describe their attitude towards Jesus, using precisely the term by which Muslims recognized both Jesus and Muhammad. In Salih’s estimation, in revering but not actually worshipping Jesus the Unitarians were also like Muslims in offering worship to God alone and not mistaking the deity for his venerable but nonetheless human messengers. In Muslim terms, then, the Unitarians were not under the misapprehensions born of shirk, of associating others with God. Finally, by translating the name of the Unitarians as muwahidin, Salih drew a correspondence with the Islamic precept of divine unity or tawhid, a term implicit in the word muwahidin. Aside from the fact that the English muwahidin seemed not to recognize the Prophet Muhammad, in Bristol and Bath Salih and Ja‘far had to all intents and purposes stumbled upon a sect of rationalizing monotheists like themselves. For Salih, these rational religionists were the ‘enlightened’ among the English. Here, in a Persian description of the religions of deepest Gloucestershire, was the same transcendental affinity that the British diplomat James Morier would develop in the metaphysical speculations that defined his later years. Then, Morier, who had travelled with Salih in Iran in 1811 and been visited by him in Bath in 1818, would proclaim an ecumenical universalism in which ‘We are all, great and small, under the direction of God’s providence’.Footnote ⁹⁴ On the road, Persians became men of reason and Britons turned mystic. Each observed something in the other with which to transform themselves.

It was not only Salih and Ja‘far, Hunter and Morier, who were connected in this way. These ideas were characteristic of a larger intellectual moment in global history. Like the writings of Britons such as Morier and later ‘colonial’ figures such as Francis Younghusband who found equivalents for their own sentiments among the transcendentalism of the Sufis and Yogis, Salih’s account of the Unitarians is an important record of a two-way attempt to find correspondences between religions that had previously been seen as dividing humankind.Footnote ⁹⁵ Among the other comparativists who emerged in Asia, there is one particular figure with whom Salih should be compared: the Persophone Hindu intellectual Ram Mohan Roy (c.1772–1833), who, in founding the first Persian newspaper, writing a native grammar for the English, and exchanging ideas with the Unitarians, led a parallel career to his Iranian contemporary (who also wrote such a grammar and went on to found the first Iranian newspaper).Footnote ⁹⁶ Like Salih and Ja‘far in Iran, in India Ram Mohan stood at the beginning of a period of intense engagement with European ideas in which travel and ‘fieldwork’ also played a key role, albeit in more clearly colonial circumstances. In a strange concentration of global history into the small Dissenting circles of Bristol, Ram Mohan’s intellectual exchanges came to intersect with Ja‘far and Salih’s. For, during Ram Mohan’s travels in England in the early 1830s, he too visited Bristol, where he too was befriended by the city’s Unitarians, spending his days in the company of the same Revd Lant Carpenter who had befriended Salih and Ja‘far fifteen years earlier.Footnote ⁹⁷ There Ram Mohan fell mortally sick and died on 27 September 1833. In an echo of the ecumenical sermon of Salih’s host Joseph Hunter, Carpenter was so moved by his conversations with his guest Ram Mohan that he preached a sermon about him in turn.Footnote ⁹⁸ Around the Indian’s memory there gathered a devoted band of followers, British and Asian, who created a new theology of Unitarianism in the interpretive space created by the reciprocal experiences of both parties. Between Bristol, Tabriz, and Calcutta, history was not merely connected but its experience was reciprocated, leading people to think through the same ideas and find the same cosmopolitan conclusions in starkly different places.

Conclusions

In reconstructing a single case of Iranian fieldwork in the ‘unexplored’ territories of the English West Country, this article has experimented with a micro-historical approach to the study of global intellectual exchanges. By refusing to define the history of a particular man at a particular moment through the rubric of colonialism, it has also sought to move beyond familiar postcolonial framings of Eurasian encounters. Lévi-Strauss described travel as movement not only in space but in the social hierarchy and for Salih this meant the elevation of being described as a ‘Persian prince’.Footnote ⁹⁹ With it came the opening of doors that Lévi-Strauss had in mind, Salih was no puppet of colonial power and, on the evidence of his own writings and of English writings about him, neither felt nor was seen as an inferior.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Fascinated and impressed he often was; but no less than his English interlocutors in turn, who were flattered by his attentions and anxious for his opinions. This is not to ignore the nascent imperial politics into which Salih and his fellow-travellers were drawn, but it is to refuse them a definitive role. Even if later developments did direct attempts at mutual knowledge through a colonial conduit, such reciprocal exchanges remained possible and were actively pursued by later scholar-travellers, both European and Asian.Footnote ¹⁰¹ If we are not to read history backwards, and not to lose sight of the individual in the collective, then we need to recognize the reciprocity of the moment. In 1818, the future had not yet happened.

Our experiment in ethnographic historiography has shown that, at exactly the same time that Britons were gathering knowledge on the ‘sects’ of Iran, Iranians were investigating the religious minorities of England. These knowledge-gathering exercises were not merely contemporaneous but were enabled by a pattern of reciprocal exchange: Iranians and Englishmen travelled between one another’s countries by the same diplomatic and maritime channels, each party learning from and indeed with the other. If the itineraries were not entirely new in themselves, their intellectual equipment was. Key to this newness was a common emphasis on observation as the proper praxis for understanding mankind. In this there was something of the new experimental method, a trust in experience over speculation that was now applied to a science of men no less than of matter.Footnote ¹⁰² Encapsulated in Salih’s purchase of his Herschelian telescope were the scientific obsessions of his circle, for whom precise observation was becoming as important as it was to the British heirs of Hooke and Boyle.

It was through such observation that, like cells beneath a microscope, a plurality of religious forms could be discovered beneath the lumpish designations of ‘Christian’ or ‘Mahometan’. In both the British accounts of Iran and the Iranian accounts of Britain that emerged from the new intellectual networks of the early 1800s, ‘fieldwork’ afforded recognition of the religious complexity of the other society by basing knowledge on direct inspection rather than discursive precedent. The journeys on which such observations were made were reciprocal as events and experiences: Asians travelled with Europeans in Asia just as Europeans travelled with Asians in Europe. By accompanying their embassy of 1810–12, Salih helped James Morier and the Ouseley brothers to understand Iran, just as they helped him to understand England through regular meetings on his travels a few years later in this way. The emergence of a form of ‘ethnographic’ knowledge acquired by the experience of another society was a two-sided endeavour and one that came of age through the new mobility of intellectuals in the early nineteenth century. The mutual knowledge that accompanied the evolution of global exchanges was created both here and there, with Asians writing about Europeans in Asian languages no less than with Europeans writing about Asians in the languages of Europe. In both cases, experience and observation – ‘fieldwork’ – formed the new epistemological touchstone. When, in the preface to his 1817 History of India, James Mill defended the possibility of knowing India from his London armchair, he was defending a dying episteme.Footnote ¹⁰³

To conclude, let us speed up the clock of history. It is 1912 and ‘Abbas Effendi ‘Abd al-Baha, the leader of the Iranian religion of Baha‘ism that has since sprung from the global exchanges of the nineteenth century, has travelled to speak at Oxford University.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His sponsors are the Unitarians of Manchester College and, by means of an interpreter on New Year’s Eve 1912, he delivers a lecture on the harmony of religion with science and the necessity of peace between all religions.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ ‘Abbas Effendi is hosted by the college principal, Dr Estlin Carpenter (1844–1927). One of the founders of the comparative study of religions, Estlin Carpenter is the grandson of the Lant Carpenter who had entertained Salih, Ja‘far, and Ram Mohan in Bristol two generations earlier. Both actors in the scene – ‘Abbas Effendi and Estlin Carpenter – are heirs to the knowledge-gatherers of the previous century, European and Asian. So much so that by now their knowledge has become entangled: the Englishman sits in contemplation of the word known to all men as the Effendi lectures to the gathered undergraduates on the divine virtues of science.