Orientalism Reconsidered: Collecting Islamic Manuscripts in Seventeenth Century Europe

Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam

In 1632, the University Library at Cambridge was transformed by the arrival of an extraordinary collection of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Malay. They were collected by an early Dutch orientalist, Thomas Van Erpe, better known by his Latinized name Erpinius. To mark the four hundredth anniversary of his death in 1624, Cambridge University Library has mounted a major exhibition of Erpinius's manuscript.

For a brief tour of the exhibition, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kCe865F7Ek

Even today, the collection continues to teach researchers important new insights into not only the Islamic past, but also into the origins of European orientalism. In this episode, we trace the background of Erpinius’s interest in Islam, before following his career as a linguist and manuscript collector that took him from his native Holland to the university cities of Europe, then Venice, before being appointed Professor of Arabic at Leiden University in 1613. Together with his writings and manuscript collection, this made him a key—but altogether complex—founder of orientalism. Nile Green talks to Majid Daneshgar, the curator of the exhibition at Cambridge and the author of Studying the Quran in the Muslim Academy (Oxford, 2020).