Martin Lings, scholar of Islam
Hyfler/Rosner
May 25, 2005, Wednesday
Martin Lings, scholar of Islam, was born on January 24,
1909. He died on May 12, 2005, aged 96.
British scholar and convert to Islam who studied Sufi
spirituality and wrote an acclaimed life of the Prophet
Muhammad.
MARTIN LINGS was the author of a number of definitive
studies on Islamic philosophy, mysticism and art, as well as
an indefatigable lecturer whose creative energies endured to
the very last day of his life.
He was born in Lancashire in 1909 and studied English
literature at Oxford, where he took his BA in 1932 and MA in
1937, before going on to become a lecturer in Anglo-Saxon
and Middle English at the University of Kaunas in Lithuania,
1935 39.
In 1939, after a trip to Egypt to study Islam and Arabic,
and an encounter with Sufis of the Shadhiliyya order, he
converted to Islam. He remained in Egypt during the 1940s,
sitting out the Second World War teaching Shakespeare to
Egyptian students at the University of Cairo, where he was
lecturer in English from 1940 to 1951. At the same time he
devoted himself to the French mystical philosopher Rene
Guenon, who had expatriated himself to Cairo from Paris.
Guenon, an exponent of what subsequently became known as the
"Traditionalist School", had also converted to Islam, and
Lings became his personal assistant and spiritual disciple
during this Egyptian decade.
In Cairo he also composed his definitive account of Sufi
doctrine in Arabic, which he later translated into English
and published under the title of The Book of Certainty: The
Sufi Doctrine of Faith, Wisdom and Gnosis (1952), taking his
Muslim name (Abu Bakr Siraj ad-Din) as his nom de plume.
On his return to Britain in the early 1950s, Lings studied
Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
London, where he obtained his doctorate in 1959. He went on
to become Keeper of Oriental Manuscripts in the British
Museum and British Library, a position which he held for
nearly two decades until 1973. In this capacity he published
two catalogues, a Second Supplementary Catalogue of Arabic
Printed Books in the British Museum (1959) and a Third
Supplementary Catalogue of Arabic Printed Books in the
British Library (1976).
Lings used the ready access to rare manuscripts which his
position at the British Library afforded him to good purpose
in other works, such as Islamic Calligraphy and Illumination
(1971) and The Qur'anic Art of Calligraphy and Illumination
(1976).
He consolidated his reputation as a leading historian of
Islamic mysticism or Sufism with the publication of his PhD
thesis: A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Shaikh Ahmad
al-'Alawi (1961). This definitive and highly sympathetic
account of an important modern Muslim mystic has appeared in
numerous editions and translations (French, Spanish,
Persian, Urdu and Arabic, among others). It was immediately
reviewed by the great Cambridge professor of Islamic
studies, A. J. Arberry, who highlighted the "important
original contributions to knowledge" made by Lings, adding:
"I know of no more lucid and convincing interpretation of
Ibn Arabi's much debated 'pantheistic' philosophy."
Lings's own world view reflected his combined interests in
comparative religion and spiritual traditions worldwide as
interpreted by Frithjof Schuon, the well-known exponent of
the Traditionalist School and advocate of that universal
wisdom known as the sophia perennis. In a number of his
publications -such as Ancient Beliefs and Modern
Superstitions (1964); The Eleventh Hour: The Spiritual
Crisis of the Modern World in the Light of Tradition and
Prophecy (1989); and Symbol and Archetype: A Study of the
Meaning of Existence (1991) -Lings closely followed the
thought of Schuon, whom he adopted as a Sufi master. Lings
himself later assumed the position of sheikh or spiritual
guide of one branch of the Shadhiliyya Sufi order.
That Lings's breadth of learning in Islamic studies was
indeed worthy of comparison with any of the other great
scholars of his generation -figures such as Louis Massignon,
R. A. Nicholson, Henry Corbin and Annemarie Schimmel -was
confirmed beyond all doubt by the publication of his classic
biography: Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources
(1983). Written from the perspective of a scholar-historian
who was also a practising Muslim, this work is widely
recognised as the most readable account of the life of the
Prophet to date. It has been translated into more than ten
languages and won a number of prizes in the Muslim world.
(Lings received an award from President Mubarak of Egypt for
the work in 1990.) One reviewer of the book, Professor Hamid
Dabashi, of Columbia, University, referred to the "alchemy"
of the text: "In reading Lings's Muhammad, we detect an
alchemical effect in his narration and composition which so
evenly combines scholarly accuracy with poetic passion.
Lings is a scholar poet." Another reviewer, Asma Afsaruddin,
of Harvard University, underlined the "gift for narration
wedded to impeccable scholarship" that Lings displays in the
work.
Equally extraordinary were Lings's skills as an ecumenical,
cross-cultural communicator who was equally at home in the
language of English belles lettres, upon which he spoke with
the same ease and erudition as he discoursed on Arabic
codicology and calligraphy. This skill is brilliantly
displayed in his work on Shakespeare in the Light of Sacred
Art (1966). In his foreword to the third revised edition
(1996) of this work, entitled The Secret of Shakespeare, the
Prince of Wales (a longtime admirer of Lings) draws
attention to the author's persuasive eloquence, admitting
that: "I found it hard to put down as it is clearly written
from an intimate, personal awareness of the meaning of the
symbols which Shakespeare used to describe the inner drama
of the journey of the soul contained, as it is, within the
outer earthly drama of the plays."
As a lecturer Martin Lings had a wonderful knack of
converting sceptics by his unassuming modesty and charming
meekness, rather than by force of erudition. His
unpretentious piety was animated by the sanctity of the Sufi
saints to which he devoted all his great powers of
eloquence, but it was his English poetic spirit which
inspired this piety that made him one of the greatest
scholars of Islamic mysticism of this generation.
Lings is survived by his wife Lesley, whom he married in
1944.