The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London by Nile Green (review)

In recent months, the victory of Nadiyah Hussain in the Great British Bake Off and the election of Sadiq Khan as the mayor of London have showcased a new multicultural United Kingdom. However, as this book by Nile Green shows, this multicultural UK is not in fact so new. Along with Ian Coller’s book Arab France, which resurrected from the historical shadows a community of mostly Muslim Arabs in Marseille and Paris around the same time, Green’s work reminds us of an earlier cosmopolitan moment, following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in the mid-1810s, when London, like Paris, was “on the verge of its transformation into the global city we know today” (p. xiii).

Building on his research for Terrains of Exchange in which he situated the Iranian linguist, printer, and diplomat Mirza (meaning “court official”) Salih in a broader context of cross-cultural interchange, Green here presents a micro-history of the visit by Salih and five other Iranian “Taliban” (in the original sense of “seekers of knowledge”) to England between September of 1815 and July of 1819. Sent from Tabriz in western Persia at the behest of the crown prince ‘Abbas Mirza, a modernizer, to obtain scientific knowledge to help defend their country from the expanding Russian Empire, this was the first group of Muslims ever to study in Western Europe. In addition to Mirza Salih, who was charged with learning English to become a translator for the Persian government, the group included Mirza Riza, who sought to examine Western artillery, eventually studying at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich; Mirza Ja’far, who aimed to learn chemistry and was assigned with a Persian medical student already in London, Hajji Baba Afshar, to study with a surgeon named Dr. Babington at the Royal College of Surgeons; Muhammad ‘Ali, a craftsman aiming to learn lock-making, who was apprenticed to a gunsmith and became one of the first Muslims to learn how a steam engine works; and Mirza Ja’far Husayni, who studied engineering, also at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. As Green explains, these students arrived at a particularly propitious time. Not only had the “Usurper” Napoleon Bonaparte been definitively defeated at Waterloo just a few weeks before, but since 1812 Iran had forged a diplomatic alliance with Great Britain, sending there its first ambassador, Abu’l-Hasan Khan, in two centuries. Moreover, the East India Company was increasingly interested in all things Persian, as was much of the British public, which embraced the romantic fad for orientalism in literature, art, and fashion.

To resurrect this cosmopolitan moment, Green rejects the conceptual framework of orientalism or post-colonialism. Instead, interrogating the popular image of this period associated with Jane Austen and mixing the micro-historical with the global, he aims to “write Muslims into the cultural history of Europe, as both participants and admirers of that culture” (xiii). For this “alternative history of England” (20), his main source is the diary (in Persian) of the student Mirza Salih, which he donated to the Bodleian Library during his later stint as ambassador to England. For Green, this diary serves as “an ink-and-paper time machine … the key to an unknown Muslim psychogeography of the city” (xi). In addition, he employs the correspondence of some of Mirza Salih’s companions and patrons, in the records of the Foreign Office, to which the students eventually appealed for financing after their initial chaperone, the military officer Captain Joseph D’Arcy, refused to provide them with additional funds.

To complicate our understanding of Jane Austen’s England, Green examines three domains in which these Muslims interacted with British society: Knowledge, Faith, and Friendship. In the first section, he details their struggle to learn the English language as well as history and culture. Ultimately, they were able to do so only by offering their own services...