James Montgomery – författare

The Ikhwan al-Safa' (Brethren of Purity), the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad, hold an eminent position in the history of science and philosophy amongst Muslims due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia, the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa' (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). The present volume is the fourth of this definitive series consisting of the very first critical edition of the Rasa'il in Arabic, complete with the first fully annotated English translation. Prepared by James Montgomery and Ignacio Sánchez, Epistle 4: 'On Geography' contains a description of the Earth and its climes of great importance to understand both the Islamic geographical tradition and the thought of the Ikhwan al-Safa'.This epistle, which was one of the few geographical works translated into Latin in Medieval Europe, clearly shows the acquaintance of its authors with the Greek Prolemaic tradition, and allows us to trace the main sources used in its composition, namely al-Farghani and al-Khwarizmi. But it is also a propaedeutic work aimed at providing the intellectual tools needed to decipher the signs of God's Creation, and at understanding the phenomena of the sub-lunar world in the light of the cosmological order. In this regard, 'On Geography' epitomises many of the central themes in the conceptual universe of the Ikhwan al-Safa', such as the conception of science as a path towards the superior knowledge of God, and the relationship between microcosmos and macrocosmos as part of the divine design.

A study of the tradition and practice of early Arabic poetry, this book provides an investigation of the multiple versions of early poems that exist in various Abbasid collections. It offers a corrective to the more exaggerated claims concerning this poetry and revises some hitherto fundamental attitudes by advancing an individual philologically-driven vision of the period.

Islam as a cultural, intellectual, and religious venture appears in the popular imagination as a monolithic entity. Orientalists of the traditional ilk have tended to describe it in essentialist terms, whilst many fundamentalist Muslims themselves promote their construction of a pure and unadulterated Islamic past, to which they strive to return by purging foreign or unauthentic elements from their religion. Next to these attempts, another more traditional view sees the influence between the Western and the Islamic world in linear and teleological terms. Knowledge was transmitted, so to speak, from Alexandria to Baghdad, and hence to Toledo and Paris. The present volume challenges both these concepts regarding the development of Islamic cultures. To do justice to the complexity of structures within which the Muslim Middle Ages unfolded, it approaches the questions of interaction and influence through a novel conceptual framework, that of crosspollination. Instead of telling the story of the transmission of Western works from Greece via Islam into the Latin world, a number of case studies highlight the plurality of encounters between Islam and other adjacent cultures.

'The best of all Montgomery's poems: in idea the most original, in execution the most powerful...' Blackwood's MagazineSouth Australia's exquisite natural gem, Kangaroo Island, has been inspiring locals for well over a century, and is now beginning to develop a formidable international reputation.It is rarely known, however, that its earliest mention in the annals of Matthew Flinders' voyages published two centuries ago, in 1814, sowed a seed of inspiration for one of the early nineteenth century's most popular poets. James Montgomery, acclaimed by Lord Byron as 'a man of considerable genius,' had a successful career spanning several decades, and huge popularity with the British public. He fought for the era's noble causes in his verse, including most notably the abolition of slavery in The West Indies, and the improvement of the conditions of chimney-sweeps in The Climbing-Boys' Soliloquies. Popular also because he was a poet of great tenderness and openness of thought, he was interested in all of the new scientific discoveries of his times, its politics great and small, and in the beliefs that underpinned what he saw as the best of humanity.In 1827, as his career reached its zenith, he produced one last long poem, destined to be the crowning glory. Summoning up all the extraordinary energies of a reformer with all the vision of a poet, he embarked upon The Pelican Island. Presented to us by a kind of recording angel or spirit, it is a narrative of nature's incredible powers of creation and destruction, of wild seas and teeming scenes, as an island grows from nothing, is peopled by all manner of plants and creatures, is wiped out by a hurricane, and then reforms in a different shape. Inspired by Flinders' mention of the islets in what is now known as Pelican Lagoon on Kangaroo Island, he portrays his island becoming a home-place for pelicans, where they come to nest and bring up young, and also where they come back to die. Later, humans come to his island and the story changes, reflecting Montgomery's concerns about our power and brutishness, and also what he saw as our necessary enlightenment and resort to belief. In towering language and powerful phrasing, he creates a broodingly rhythmic and driving tour-de-force, marrying intensity of thought and colour with great philosophical scope and humanity.