MUIR, SIR WILLIAM (1819-1905)

This article appears in Volume V18, Page 958 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: MOS-NAN

MUIR, SIR WILLIAM (1819-1905) , Scottish Orientalist, brother of the preceding, was born at Glasgow on the 27th of April 1819. He was educated at Kilmarnock Academy, at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, and at Haileybury College, and in 1837 entered the Bengal Civil Service. He served as secretary to the

governor

GOVERNOR (from the Fr. gouverneur, from gouverner, O. Fr. governer, Lat. gubernare, to steer a ship, to direct, guide)

of the North-West Provinces, and as a member of the

Agra

AGRA

revenue board, and during the Mutiny he was in charge of the intelligence department there. In 1865 he was made foreign secretary to the Indian Government. In 1867 he was knighted (K.C.S.I.), and in 1868 he became lieutenant-

governor

GOVERNOR (from the Fr. gouverneur, from gouverner, O. Fr. governer, Lat. gubernare, to steer a ship, to direct, guide)

of the North-West Provinces. In 1874 he was appointed financial member of the Council, and retired in 1876, when he became a member of the Council of India in London. He had always taken an

interest

INTEREST

in educational matters, and it was chiefly through his exertions that the central college at Allahabad, known as Muir's College, was built and endowed. In 1885 he was elected principal of Edinburgh University in succession to Sir Alexander Grant, and held the post till 1903, when he retired. Sir William Njuir was a profound Arabic scholar, and made a careful study of the history of the time of Mahomet and the early caliphate. His

chief

CHIEF (from Fr. chef, head, Lat. caput)

books are a Life of Mahomet and History of Islam to the Era of the Hegira; Annals of the Early Caliphate; The Caliphate, an abridgment and continuation of the Annals, which brings the record down to the fall of the caliphate on the onset of the Mongols; The Koran: its Composition and Teaching; and The Mohammedan Controversy, a reprint of five essays published at intervals between 1885 and 1887. In 1881 he delivered the Rede lecture at

Cambridge

on The Early Caliphate and Rise of Islam. He married in 1840 Elizabeth Huntly Wemyss (d. 1897), and had five sons and six daughters; four of his sons served in India, and one of them, Colonel A. N. Muir
(d. 1899), was acting

resident

RESIDENT

in Nepal.
MUKADDASI' [the appellation of Shams ad Din Abu Abdallah
Mahommed ibn Abmad] (/t. 967985), Arabian traveller, author of a Description of the Lands of Islam which is the most

original

ORIGINAL

and among the most important of Arabic geographies of the middle ages. His family name was Al Bashari. His paternal grandfather was an architect who constructed many public works in Palestine, especially at Acre, and his mother's family was opulent. His maternal grandfather, a man of artistic and literary tastes, migrated to Jerusalem from Jurjan province in Persia, near the frontier of Khorasan. His descriptions rest on extensive travels through a long

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of years. His first

pilgrimage

PILGRIMAGE (Fr. pelerinage, Lat. peregrinatio)

was made at the age of twenty (in A.H. 356=A.D. 967), but his book was not published till A.H. 375 (A.D. 985-986), when
he was forty years old.
The two MSS. (at Berlin and Constantinople) represent a later recension (A.H. 378). The book became known in Europe through the copy brought from India by

Sprenger

SPRENGER, JAKOB (fl. 1500)

, and was edited by Professor M. J. de Goeje as the third part of his Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum (Leiden, 1877). See also the English translation (unfinished) by G. S. A. Ranking and R. F. Azoo, in Bibliothech Indica, New

Series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

, Nos. 899, 952, 1001 (Bengal Asiatic Society, 18971901); Mulcaddasi's Syrian chapter has been separately translated and edited in English by Guy le Strange (London, Pales-tine Pilgrims Text Society, 1886); in German by J.Gildemeister in Zeitschrift des deutschen Palestina-Vereins, vol. vii. (1884).

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