 |
|
| Robert Irwin | |
Author, scholar and historian Robert Irwin, best known for a series of 10 historical and fantastical novels, died June 28. He was 77. The Guardian reported that his first book, The Arabian Nightmare, was already written in the late 1970s when Irwin attended a writing course at Morley College in London.
It was there he met another aspiring novelist, Eric Lane, who would go on to found Dedalus Press and publish The Arabian Nightmare as one of Dedalus's first three books.
"There was great excitement when Hatchards in Piccadilly had sold a copy of The Arabian Nightmare," Lane said, "but unfortunately it was later found out of position in the bookshop." The novel was later republished by both Penguin and Dedalus, and has been translated into 20 languages.
In addition to novels such as The Limits of Vision (1986), Irwin also published a series of nonfiction works about the Middle East and Islam, including The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994), Islamic Art (1997), Night and Horses and the Desert: The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (1999), The Alhambra (2004), Mamluks and Crusaders (2010), and Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography (2018).
The most controversial of Irwin's works was "his polemical study For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), published in the U.S. as Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. There he took issue with Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and its pervasive influence," the Guardian noted.
Irwin studied modern history at Merton College, Oxford, and then worked on a thesis about the Mamluks, which remained incomplete. He converted to Islam at this time and, as he recalled in Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties (2011), entered a Sufi order as an initiate, in the Algerian town of Mostaganem.
In London "he tried LSD, anarchism, theosophy and everything else that the '60s had to offer," the Guardian wrote, adding that these early experiences and others served as material for novels like Satan Wants Me (1999), The Runes Have Been Cast (2021), and Tom's Version (2023); the latter two were two-thirds of a trilogy that Irwin was working on at the time of his death.
"His love of books, meanwhile, led to the creation of a library that was, he confessed, more abundant than orderly," the Guardian noted. His study "ran not only to an astrolabe, purchased in a Damascan souk, but a Qur'an stand 'bought very cheap in an auction in Scotland in the 1970s,' a number of Venetian carnival masks, a brass celestial globe 'bought in a street market in Mumbai' and an armillary sphere 'which came from a church jumble sale.' "