In 1717 Simon Ockley, a clergyman and Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University, published a collection of proverbs entitled Sentences of Ali son-in-law of Mahomet, and his fourth successor. The book consisted of proverbs traditionally attributed to Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph of Islam, which Ockley had selected and translated from an Arabic manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford entitled Ghurar al ḥikam wa-durar al-kilam.  

Ockley’s Sentences consists of 169 proverbs translated from Arabic into English. The proverbs in the collection vastly range in topic and explore themes such as the importance of obedience to God (‘The Favour of God, He be Praised, is joined to the Obedience towards him’);  the deceptive nature of worldly delights (‘The Love of the Present World is the Cause of Misery’);  the importance of controlling one’s tongue (‘A Man is hid under his Tongue’); the importance of scholarship (‘Good Education is the Cause of a refined Disposition’); and forbearance in the face of adversity (‘Impatience under Affliction is worse than the Affliction’)[1]. Ockley specifically selected proverbs that did not require explanations of Arab cultural specificities which his readers would be unfamiliar with.

However, my focus in this post is not on the proverbs themselves, but the way in which Ockley frames their origins for his readers in his preface to the collection. He presents the proverbs as the embodiment of a tradition of wisdom stretching from antiquity to his present day, having been developed and preserved by the Muslims of the Arabian peninsula. The wisdom of the Muslims expressed in Ali’s proverbs is interwoven with the wisdom of Christians, Jews, and Ancient peoples of this region in chains of transmission spanning millennia.  As such, he argues, the Christian West of the eighteenth century can establish a connection with ancient wisdom through reading the proverbs, the fruits of which are evidenced in the spiritual lives of the proverbs’ heirs in the Islamic world.

The editor describes the proverbs as ‘a little collection of Wise Sentences, calculated for the Direction of Man’s conduct in Affairs of the greatest Consideration’. As a guide to living a pious, spiritual life of devotion they are, in short, ‘not much less than our New Testament’. Ockley notes that this assessment may come as a surprise to most of his contemporary readers who ignorantly and arrogantly believe that the West is the repository of all wisdom, even though in reality ‘that little smattering of Knowledge which we have, is entirely derived from the East’. He asserts that the West may have the upper hand in regards to ‘Advances in the Sciences’, but he dismisses this as ‘not so much to our present Purpose, as the Consideration of Things of Universal Necessity’, as expressed in the proverbs.

The timeless wisdom of these proverbs had been part of a living tradition in the East since before the time of the ancient Greeks. The West, however, were the unfortunate receptors of a faulty line of transmission. The Greeks, who the clergyman identifies as a primary source of Western discourse, were ‘a vain, conceited People, who never penetrated into the Depths of Oriental Wisdom’ and failed to take advantage of the ancient wisdom that was available to them. The Greeks passed on what little wisdom and learning they had to the Romans. After European barbarian tribes had run amok in the Western Roman Empire, ‘the Arabians, by their Conquests, restored it again in Europe’.

It was not possible that Ali could have been the author of all the proverbs, although it was likely that he was the author of some, Ockley argues. He suggests instead that there are two other primary sources for the ancient wisdom couched in the proverbs of the Arabs. The first source was the various peoples who emigrated to the Arabian peninsula fleeing recurrent warfare between the Eastern and Western powers on either side of the Gulf prior to Alexander the Great’s conquests. These refugees, with their anciently derived culture, settled and intermarried in Arabia. The second source was the wisdom of the Arabs themselves who had their own historical tradition derived from the prophetic line of Ishmael and Abraham. The two streams naturally converged into one, and Ockley describes how he believes this wisdom evolved from an oral to a written tradition:

And it was their Custom always, either at the Parting with their Children, and especially upon their Death-Beds, to recommend to them some few Precepts founded upon their own or their Fore-fathers Experience, which afterwards encreasing, were collected into Volumes by Wise and Learned Men. After the same manner Ecclesiasticus was written, as appears by the Preface of it, and this Arabick one of ours, without all question; but how or by whom, remains yet undiscovered.[2]

Throughout the preface, Ockley refers to the wisdom and religion of the ‘Arabs’, as opposed to using terms of religious identification. However, it is specifically the Muslims of the Arab world, rather than say, Arab Christian communities, that he has in mind in the preface, as evidenced when he addresses Christian objections to the Muslim practice of polygamy. He suggests that the practice should not detract from his assertion that the Arabs ‘govern their Families with Prudence and Discretion’ because, after all, ‘they are not Christians, and therefore continue their way of Living, after the Patriarchal Manner’. Polygamy aside, Ockley gives the reader some examples of the continuity of this primordial wisdom in the Arab world, and  compares it to the way in which European Christian communities live. He contrasts the aforementioned ‘Prudence and Discretion’ of the Arab head of a family to the archetypal European, who attempts to ‘jangl[e] it out with his wife thirty of forty years together, which of the two should govern the Family’. He also offers the comparison of Arab ‘Decency and Sobriety of Behaviour’ with the vanity of his own countrymen, who waste time and money ‘bespeaking a New Suit this Week, lest he should be the Jest of the Town and Country, for being out of Fashion the next!’. The reasons for the differences in the spiritual qualities between his English compatriots and the Arabs are clear to Ockley: ‘They have their Wisdom by Inheritance… They are tenacious in their ancient customs.’ Luckily for the eighteenth-century Christian reader, the diligence of the Arabs in maintaining and developing this wisdom, combined with Ockley’s efforts of translation enabled an opportunity for the restoration of the connection which history had severed.

There are several examples of English thinkers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who were favourably discussing Islam in the context of a radical Protestant tradition.[3] As an orthodox Anglican who discussed an Islamic text in this way, Ockley is an example of how these positive discussions did not take place solely on the radical fringes of England’s dissenting sects, but also occurred among those in the orthodox core of England’s national church. The attraction of these proverbs for traditional, innovation-averse Ockley was not that they presented new-fangled religious ideas to the West, but rather that they represented ancient wisdom that the West had lost. The Islamic dimension of this wisdom was, far from causing some sort of religious anxiety, accepted and embraced, indistinguishable as it was from the other strands of transmission that combined to form the universal truths of the proverbs. The truth of the proverbs for Ockley was not bound by either place, time, or religion- although the Muslim Arabs had his special admiration for their crucial role in expressing, sustaining, and living by it.

Image: ‘The Meeting of the Theologians’ by Abd Allah Musawwir, mid-16th century. Accessed here.

[1] Simon Ockley, Sentences of Ali, 1717

[2] Ibid

[3] See Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment 1670-1840