History, Islam, and Empire in Public School Prize Essays
Molly Groarke (University of Cambridge)
In 1858, Walter John Lawrance was awarded the school prize for the best essay written in English on a historical subject. His essay was titled ‘The Saracens in Europe’. The son of a solicitor, Lawrance had been sent to St Paul’s School, a public school in London, aged nine. He was academically successful, winning several essay prizes, and eventually becoming the captain of the school. He opened his 1858 prize-winning essay with the following lines:
It would be difficult to find any episode in the history of the world more fraught with interest than that which contains the narration of the marvellous rise and propagation of the religion of Islam: from the time when the solitary enthusiast of Mecca expounded his pretended revelations to his few chosen adherents, until the time that the creed of the Koran [Qur’an] was well-nigh supreme over a large portion of the civilized globe.
This was high praise for Islam, a religion which Lawrance later described in his essay as ‘a creed seemingly so contrariant to Christianity’. In the nineteenth century, Christian beliefs and values were central to the education provided by British public schools. Should we be surprised, then, at finding such respect and admiration for a different religion in a prize-winning school essay? Especially given that during latter half of the nineteenth century, ascendant British imperial ideologies often relied on the belief that other races and religions were inherently inferior. To understand Lawrance’s words we need to look at what ideas might have been influencing him as he wrote.
For some time, there had been a growth of interest in Islam amongst British and European scholars. The Qur’an had been translated into English over one hundred years previously, and prominent scholars such as Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle presented laudatory accounts of Islam in their works, including heroic portrayals of Muhammad, Islam’s founder. There were even several high-profile conversions to Islam from Britons who had developed an interest in the religion after travelling to the Middle East or North Africa.
However, this fascination with Islam was deeply Orientalist. Orientalism refers to how Western scholars, writers, and artists viewed, stereotyped, and subjugated non-Western societies and cultures. Most people in Britain did not conceive of Islam in a balanced way, understanding it through only some of its essential characteristics, which led to negative prejudices. The growth of scientific racism and other racial theories meant that many Muslims, such as Arabic and Turkic peoples, were considered inferior to white Britons. These caricatured and romanticised portrayals of Islam were part of how the British Empire exercised authority over its subjects.
There was also a practical need for knowledge of Islam in Britain. In the nineteenth century, Islam became the majority religion in the Empire, as more regions in Asia and Africa became colonised by the British. To govern effectively, British officials needed some idea of the people they were governing. In 1857, a major uprising against British rule in India had been prompted partly by an incident which saw British officers issue their Indian soldiers a new type of gun cartridge greased with pig and cow fat, forbidden in Islam and Hinduism respectively. Angry that they had been forced to contravene their religious beliefs, alongside other injustices they had experienced at the hands of the British, the Indian soldiers led a rebellion that was only suppressed with considerable violence. Many in Britain began to realise that they needed to better understand non-Christian beliefs and customs if they were to keep hold of power. Given their role in preparing their students for future careers in the British Empire, public schools needed to teach their students about other faiths and cultures.
We can see evidence for this by looking into the archives of two public schools: Rugby School in Warwickshire, and St Paul’s School in London. Both schools have comparable collections of prize essays; essays by students written in English that answered a pre-set question or topic, usually on an historical subject. At Rugby, this took the form of the Queen’s Medal from 1847, while St Paul’s awarded the Truro Prize from 1851. Winners of the Queen’s Medal were awarded a gold coin and winners of the Truro Prize received thirty guineas. Many of the essays explored ideas that related to empire. Within this group that engaged with imperial themes, a significant number of essays discussed understandings of Islam and the Islamic Empire, as in the following list of titles:
· The Effects of the Fall of Constantinople, As Influencing the Religion, Arts, and Literature of Europe (St Paul’s; 1856)
· The Saracens in Europe (St Paul’s; 1858)
· The Influence of the Crusades on the Arts and Literature of Europe (St Paul’s; 1861)
· The Influences which formed the character of Mahomet, and the influence on the Mahometan religion of the personal character of the Founder (Rugby; 1881)*
· The Influence of Mahomet upon Europe for Good and Evil (Rugby; 1887)*
· The Influence of Individuals on History, with special reference to Mohammed and other founders of moral, or political, systems (Rugby; 1894)
[Essays marked with an asterisk do not survive in the archive; we only have the title of the essay.]
The Queen’s Medal, awarded annually at Rugby School for the best essay on a historical subject written in English.
These titles show us that Islam and Islamic history featured significantly on the curriculum at St Paul’s and Rugby. Several words were used alongside ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslims’ to mean the same thing, such as ‘Saracens’, ‘Moslems’, or ‘Mahometans’ (literally the followers of Muhammad). The Crusades and the Fall of Constantinople – mentioned in two of the essay titles – were historical events that saw Muslim armies and empires defeat Christian nations.
Prize Essays as Historical Sources: Things to Consider
Before we explore these prize essays in further detail, it is worth briefly thinking about what type of information we can get from them. Prize essays did not contain the students’ direct thoughts. They were written specifically in the hope of being awarded a prize; their student authors had in mind the judges, who were usually the schoolmasters or sometimes the school governors. So, the ideas expressed in the essays tell us what the students thought the school authorities would appreciate, rather than what the students themselves actually believed (although these may well have been the same thing).
The St Paul’s essay collection is particularly useful as it often contains not only the essay awarded first prize, but also the essays awarded second prize and the Governors’ Prize. This means in some cases we have three essays on the same subject to compare. While there are variations in the writing style and the structure of the essays, the content of the essays and the argument advanced in them tended to be very similar. The prize essays were not necessarily a place for experimental ideas or controversial arguments. Given the similarities between the essays, it seemed clear to the students what they should write – the essays distinguished themselves by how they were written, structured, or organised. Therefore, these essays can tell us the content of the education provided by the school, as well as the schools’ expectations of their students, less about individual views or independent research undertaken by the students
We can learn more about the schools’ curricula and reading lists by looking at other sources alongside the prize essays. At Rugby, exams were conducted prior to the essay writing to prepare students with the type of knowledge that would need to be deployed in the essay. The pictures below show two exam papers from 1894, when the Queen’s Medal essay asked students to evaluate the influence of individuals on history, using the Prophet Muhammad (referred to as ‘Mahomet’ below) as an example:
Most of the questions concerned early Islamic history, of which students needed to show detailed knowledge. Only the second question in the first paper was directly concerned with Islamic doctrine, asking ‘What, in the fewest words, is the Mahometan creed?’. The second paper only asked doctrinal questions in the seventh and eighth questions. The students were not taught detail about the theology of Islam or different interpretations of the Qur’an’s teaching. This could lead to misconceptions or simplifications of Islamic beliefs.
At the top of both exam papers was a text, which students were supposed to read before answering the questions. This gives us an insight into what they were reading, which can further supplement the prize essays as historical sources. At the top of the first exam paper, ‘Gibbon, ch. L and ch. LI’, refers to chapters fifty and fifty-one of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. These chapters presented a very positive account of Islam which emphasised the genius of Muhammad and praised Islamic rituals of prayer fasting and almsgiving.
The second exam paper was based on Reginald Bosworth Smith’s book Mohammed and Mohammedanism. Smith had delivered a series of lectures in 1874 on Mohammed and Islam, which were later typed out and bound into a book. According Smith’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, his lectures ‘defended the character and teaching of the Prophet and acknowledged the benefits of Islam to Africa’. This incited criticism from Christian missionaries and praise from many Muslims who read the lectures after they were translated into Arabic.
Reginald Bosworth Smith, author of Mohammed and Mohammedanism [picture from Wikimedia Commons].
That Rugby had its students read these books specifically suggested that the school was open to – perhaps even supportive of – a sympathetic understanding of Islam. Its possible that this attitude was deemed most appropriate for future colonial administrators.
So, the prize essays provide a good insight into the views of public school teachers and governors, especially when read alongside other sources. A final point to make is that the essays are historical; they discuss Islam through certain key historical moments. History was very important to the Victorians in understanding their national identity and their place in the world. Most Victorians saw history as one grand narrative of progress (a theory of history known as Whig History), in which events in the past contributed towards improving society in some way, up until the present which was seen as the culmination of all of these developments and the forefront of human civilisation. In the later ninteenth century, Britain’s understanding of and relationship to Islam was deeply shaped by events that had happened in the distant past. The prize essays engaged with established historical ideas, which saw Islam alternately as a protector of European civilisation and an aggressive force capable of destroying Christianity. These two opposing stories help explain why the Victorians saw Islam in such a complex way and why it was so important to the British Empire.
The Origins of Islam
From the year 610 CE, the Prophet Muhammad started experiencing revelations which he believed had been sent by God. In 622, Muhammad led a pilgrimage from his hometown of Mecca to Medina, where he established the world’s first Muslim community. Over the following decades Muhammad accrued a vast number of followers and, by the time of his death in 632, most of the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to Islam.
In 1894, Rugby School’s Queen’s Medal was awarded to Robert Reid Bannatyne, for his essay on ‘The Influence of Individuals on History’, which used Muhammad as its main case study. Bannatyne struck a balanced argument, putting forth the case that individuals can shape and influence history significantly, but they can only do so to a certain extent as they are constrained by the circumstances and events of the period they live in. While Muhammad was influential – Bannatyne argued – he lived in a period and a place which was already favourable to a religious revolution.
While Bannatyne praised Muhammad himself highly, he expressed critical and racist views about the Arabic people. He believed that Muhammad had rescued Arabic people from their previous barbaric culture. For example, he wrote: ‘All the practices that most distinguished Arabian life – the murder of female children, blood feuds, unlimited polygamy and divorce, drunkenness and gambling – all there Mahommed abolished’. He also praised Muhammad for ending ‘idolatry’, that is, the worshipping of false gods. In Bannatyne’s essay, Muhammad was singled out amongst the Arabic people as particularly civilised and humane. While this showed admiration for Islamic beliefs – particularly in this early period of Islamic history – the earliest converts to Islam were criticised for imagined racial or ethnic characteristics.
‘The Dark Ages’
According to Victorian historical accounts, as Islam was beginning to flourish on the Arabian Peninsula, a very different process was happening in Europe. The ‘Dark Ages’, or early Middle Ages, was a period from about 600 to 1100, which the Victorians believed was characterised by intellectual, economic, and cultural decline. Today, many historians think that this was a misguided, pessimistic characterisation about a period that was just different to our own, but in the nineteenth century it was widely believed.
Walter John Lawrance – the St Paul’s student who we met at the start – discussed Europe’s Dark Ages in both his prize-winning essays. In 1856, he opened his essay with the following words: ‘Darkness, universal and supreme, reigned over the Western World. […] Learning, driven from its ancient abode, took refuge in the East’. In 1858, Lawrance expanded on this: ‘it was during this time that the age of Arabian learning existed, an era which lasted for five hundred years, and which has derived additional brilliancy from its contrast with a period during which Europe was almost in a state of universal darkness’. Lawrance argued that while Europe was stuck in the Dark Ages, it was the Islamic Empire that became the seat of learning, that preserved scholarly knowledge, and that advanced civilisation.
This argument was especially pronounced in his essays on the ‘Saracens in Europe’. After Muhammad’s death, Islam continued to grow and attract converts. Under the caliphs, the successors of Muhammad, Islam became an empire, as Muslim armies led conquests of vast regions of the Middle East and North Africa. The Islamic Empire continued to expand further afield, even into Europe, ruling most of the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 1492. Lawrance argued that the region flourished during this period. He wrote that Córdoba (or Cordova), a city in present-day Spain, became ‘the seat of European empire and learning’ and ‘was upheld in unparalleled magnificence and splendour’. He continued:
From France, from Italy, from England, and from Teutonic Christendom, were their most able professors and most advanced scholars sent to Cordova; for it seemed that Christianity had not yet so forgotten its humility as not to deign to learn things of which it was ignorant, even from the infidel and the Saracen.
Lawrance praised Islamic literature, linguistics, philosophy, astronomy, chemistry, and mathematics, identifying them as far more advanced than the scholarship of Christian nations during this period.
It is possible that heaping such praise on the medieval Islamic Empire helped Britons to deal with the fact that a Christian, European army had been defeated by one that – according to contemporary ideas – was neither favoured by God, nor a superior race. Identifying the Dark Ages as a period when Europe was in temporary decline explained why the Islamic Empire was able to penetrate Europe. Lawrance pinned down the reason for the success of the Islamic Empire in the inadequacy of Spain’s previous rulers, who were weakened by constant internal disagreements, not necessarily in the military superiority of the Muslim armies. Emphasising Islamic intellectual progress in the medieval period also relegated these triumphs to the distant past. At the time Lawrance was writing, the positions had reversed; while Britain was extending and consolidating its authority across vast regions of the world, the Islamic Ottoman Empire had garnered a reputation as ‘the sick man of Europe’, its power waning as it was rocked by internal divisions and instability.
The Crusades
The Dark Ages began to come to an end with the Crusades. The Crusades were in many ways the origin story of the narrative of Islamic-Christian hostility. In the medieval period, Christians and Muslims regularly lived peacefully and cooperatively alongside one another, recognising the central beliefs they shared as fellow monotheistic faiths. This collaboration was later forgotten by many, overshadowed by the conflict that was the Crusades.
Beginning in 1095, the Crusades were a series of military campaigns by Christian armies from Europe, who sought to reclaim the Holy Land (Jerusalem and its surrounding areas) from Muslim control. Some of these campaigns were directed by the papacy, while others were led by various European monarchs or public figures. While some temporary gains were made, ultimately the Crusades failed in permanently taking back the Holy Lands, which remained under Muslim rule. However, the 1861 prize essays in the St Paul’s School archive on ‘The Influence of the Crusades on the Arts and Literature of Europe’, identified a triumph behind the defeat. Alfred William South argued that ‘by rousing Europe from its lethargy, and by increasing the wealth and prosperity of Italy’, the Crusades ‘were indirectly instrumental in furthering the progress of literature and the fine arts’. By invigorating Europe with a military spirit that it had been lacking, progress in scholarship and the arts once again resumed. Despite their eventual failure, the Crusades – with their heroism, romance, enthusiasm, and religiosity – offered a powerful origin story for European attempts at colonisation.
South described how many of the Crusaders had fought in Spain and saw the benefits ‘which the industry and ingenuity of the Saracens had reared in that country’ – on their return home, they were inspired to copy aspects of the society they had witnessed. Leaders of the Islamic armies, most famously Salah al-Din, were lauded for their ‘generosity’, ‘intelligence’, and ‘refinement’. It was not all positive, though. For example, two of the essays mention that Islamic painting was not particularly advanced and almost non-existent, due to a teaching in the Qur’an that forbade Muslims from making representations of humans or animals in art. However, for the most part these medieval Muslims were presented as noble adversaries, who Christians learned from in their defeat.
The Crusades were pinpointed as the moment of the birth of European civilisation; governors’ prize-winner Robert Barlow Gardiner wrote that ‘they were the womb from whence sprang the infant, Civilization, who, passing through a lusty boyhood, has grown to the giant strength of our own time’. The defeat of Christian armies by Muslim ones could be accounted for with the reasoning that Europe was a mere child in developmental terms at that time. The other prize-winner, Risdon Darracott Bennett, wrote how ‘we look with wonder at the Turks of the present day and can hardly understand how the ancestors of such a people should ever have been the terror of Christendom’. Here Bennett draws a clear distinction between medieval Muslims and contemporary Muslims, explaining how Britons could be so admiring and so critical of Islam simultaneously.
The Fall of Constantinople
In 1453, the city of Constantinople fell to invading forces. Previously the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire, it was taken over by the expanding Islamic Ottoman Empire, which now loomed on the eastern borders of Europe. Looking back on this event from over four hundred years later, the Victorians lamented this defeat for Christendom. But again, they found a silver lining. The Fall of Constantinople, coming at the end of the medieval period, essentially finished what the Crusades had started. The three prize essays written by St Paul’s students in 1856 sought to describe ‘The effects of the fall of Constantinople, as influencing the religion, arts, and literature of Europe’. All three essays advanced the same argument: the fall of Constantinople led the thriving community of Christian scholars who had lived there to flee to Europe. They brought with them forgotten Greek and Roman texts and ultimately sparked the European Renaissance, a period of scientific, artistic, and philosophical advancement inspired by a revival of ancient learning from the classical empires.
So, according to the prize essays, the fall of Constantinople was yet another historical event where Islamic armies were ostensibly victorious, but inadvertently benefited Europe. This time it was not Islamic learning and scholarship that inspired Europe, but Christian knowledge that arrived in Europe because of the Islamic conquests. In these essays – as with the Rugby essay which described the origins of Islam amongst the Arabic people – the aggressors were demonised for their ethnicity as Turks, rather than for their religion as Muslims. Thomas Graham, winner of the first prize, wrote ‘it was by the letting loose on society of the Turk in all his power and cruelties […] that Europe was regenerated’. Therefore – Graham continued – ‘at the dying lamp of the East was kindled the far more glorious flame of the West’. The ‘Eastern empire’ of Christendom, Byzantium, was replaced by the growing power of the Western European empires, a development prompted by conflict with Islam.
The Fall of Constantinople was the catalyst for European nations to found colonies across the world, according to the St Paul’s essays. The Renaissance saw advances in geography, cartography, and navigation, with inventions such as the compass and the printing press enabling people and ideas to travel further than ever before. Graham argued that this stimulated competition and commerce amongst the European nations – ‘the products of India no longer passed through the hands of the Arabs’; rather, Europeans displaced the Arabic people as a trading partner in many regions of the world.
To be sure, the essays lamented the loss of Constantinople from Christendom – the city was still in Ottoman hands at the time the students were writing. All three of the essays grieved the loss of St. Sophia, a Christian church that was turned into a mosque after the takeover. Lawrance deplored how ‘the city of Constantine has yielded to the followers of Mohammed’ and ‘the crescent surmounts the burnished dome of St. Sophia’. Yet he concluded his essay with the hope that Constantinople might return to Christianity: ‘Constantinople will “Welcome home again discarded faith;” and, rising with a consciousness of might, will shake off its load; and, amid the universal joy of the whole Western world, place again the holy cross on the dome of St. Sophia.’ Was this an incitement for the British to colonise Constantinople, perhaps even to revive the spirit of the Crusades? Whether it was or not, it clearly shows that these events from the distant past still held immense importance and sentimentality to the Victorians. The symbols of Christianity and Islam, the cross and the crescent, were still fundamentally in opposition.
The Grand Mosque Hagia Sophia in modern-day Istanbul, Turkey. It was originally built as the church of St. Sophia in the city then known as Constantinople.
Writing History, Building Empires
These prize essays reveal how public schools used history to develop and bolster imperial mindsets in their students. The historical accounts of Islam that students presented in their essays tended to admire and praise Islam, acknowledging its supremacy over European and Christian nations in the medieval period. However, this interpretation of the medieval Islamic empire, was contrasted sharply by the interpretation of the Islamic empire in its nineteenth-century form, the Ottoman Empire. While Britain was an ally of the Ottoman Empire, its instability and weakness threatened the balance of power in Europe. Muslims were also frequently negatively racialised, as Britain attempted to exert authority over non-white people. Many of the negative beliefs and assumptions about Islam that arose in the period of the British Empire persisted into the 20th and 21st centuries. These only began to be seriously challenged as more Muslims made Britain their home after the Second World War and a more distinct British-Muslim identity began to form.
This tension – between Victorian interpretations of medieval Islam and of nineteenth-century Islam – explains the complex and seemingly contradictory narratives about Islam that appear in the Rugby and St Paul’s prize essays. Islam, while often admired for its early intellectual and cultural achievements, was also filtered through Orientalist and racist frameworks that served British imperial ideologies. By casting Islamic empires primarily as contributors to European progress, these essays offered a narrative in which the rise of Britain could be seen as the natural culmination of world history. Understanding these prize essays helps us see how empire, religion, and history featured importantly in British public school education – and how the past was used to justify power in the present.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Ansari, Humayun, The Infidel Within: Muslims in Britain since 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Geaves, Ron, Islam in Victorian Britain: The Life and Times of Abdullah Quilliam (La Vergne: Kube Publishing, 2010).
Goddard, Hugh, ‘Christian Views of Islam’, St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. Edited by Brendan N. Wolfe et al. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/ViewsofIslam.
Pugh, Martin, Britain and Islam: A History from 622 to the Present Day (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
Randall, Vicky, History, Empire, and Islam: E. A. Freeman and Victorian Public Morality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).
Robinson-Dunn, Diane, The Harem, Slavery and British Imperial Culture: Anglo-Muslim Relations in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).
Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
