Arabic & Persian Studies Teaching Staff

Professor James Montgomery
Prof. James MontgomeryContact Information

Email: jem33@cam.ac.uk

Current Position

Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic
Fellow of Trinity Hall

Biographical Details

J.E. Montgomery is University Professor of Classical Arabic. He studied Arabic and Ancient Greek at Glasgow University (1980-1984), spent two years on an unfinished DPhil at Oxford (1984-1986), where he was a Snell Exhibitioner at Balliol College before taking up a lectureship at Glasgow (1986-1992), where he decided to do a different PhD which he submitted just before the birth of his daughter Natasha. Senior Letcureships at Oslo and Leeds preceded his move to Cambridge in 1997. Among the things James has managed to do are: play Rugby Union for Norway in the Baltic Cup; run a half marathon; found the journal Middle Eastern Literatures and its monograph series Studies in Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures; be International Visiting Scholar at NYU (1997); help set up the Third Edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam and revivify the School of ʿAbbasid Studies; survive being Chairman of his Faculty and Acting Senior Tutor of his College; see David Byrne in concert; attend the wedding at Hampton Court of a member of the British royal family; deliver the K.W. and E.K. Rosenthal Memorial Lecture in Ancient and Near Eastern Civilisations at Yale in 2008; set up the Library of Arabic Literature; look after two dogs.

Research Interests

Professor Montgomery's principal, current, research project is `Abbasid intellectual history, with especial reference to the first two `Abbasid centuries. He has concentrated over the last ten years on his inability to understand what is meant by the term adab. He is approaching this aporia through two (long overdue) books on one of his heroes, the theologian al-Jahiz (d. 868/9), that enthralling, baffling and challenging thinker who deserves to be so much better known: Al-Jahiz and His Books, 1: In Praise of Books; Al-Jahiz and His Books, 2: In Censure of Books. He is trying to understand why and how so many of the nascent Islamic disciplines, from Qurʾanic exegesis and prophetic traditions to jurisprudence, science (especially alchemy), speculative theology and Greco-Arabic philosophy, conjoin and intersect in his corpus of writings.

In ‘Convention as Cognition: On the Cultivation of Emotion,’ he found himself trying to read Arabic love poetry through the lens of the ethical and hygienic theories of music propounded by the Arabic philosophers.

  • www.amazon.co.uk/Takhyil-Imaginary-Classical-Arabic-Poetics/dp/0906094690/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1298290016&sr=1-1

And in his Rosenthal Lecture, delivered at Yale in April 2008, he aspired to do for the 'Abbasids what Lytton Strachey did for the Victorians.

Other recent publications include several articles on al-Jahiz: ‘Jahiz on Jest and Earnest,’ in: G. Tamer (ed.), Humor in der arabischen Kultur, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 209-239; ‘Speech and Nature: Jahiz, Bayān 2.175-207, Parts 1-4,’ in: Middle Eastern Literatures 11/2 (2008), pp. 169-181; 12/1 (2009), pp. 1-25; 12/2 (2009), pp. 107-125; 12/4 (2009), pp. 213-232.

He concluded his investigations of the Arabic geographers and his interest in the Arabic sources on the Vikings with two articles: ‘The Vikings in Arabic Sources,’ in: S. Brink and N. Price (edd.), The Viking World, Oxford and New York: Routledge 2008, pp. 550-561; and ‘Vikings and Rus in Arabic Sources,’ in Living Islamic History, ed. Yasir Suleiman (Edinburgh: EUP, 2010), pp. 151-165.

  • www.amazon.co.uk/Viking-World-Routledge-Worlds/dp/0415333156/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1298290110&sr=1-2

  • www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Islamic-History-Professor-Hillenbrand/dp/0748637389/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1298290173&sr=1-1

His edition and translation of Ibn Fadlan’s Epistle will appear as part of the Library of Arabic Literature.

Over the last five years several editorial projects have come to fruition: Gregor Schoeler, The Oral and the Written in Early Islam (London: Routledge, 2006).

  • www.amazon.co.uk/Written-Routledge-Studies-Eastern-Literatures/dp/0415394953/

Gregor Schoeler, The Biography of Muhammad: Nature and Authenticity (London: Routledge, 2010).

  • www.amazon.co.uk/Biography-Muhammed-Routledge-Studies-Classical/dp/0415567173/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1298289874&sr=1-7

Arabic Philosophy, Arabic Theology. From the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank (Leuven: Peeters, 2006),

  • www.peeters-leuven.be/boekoverz.asp?nr=8112

in which he was able to honour a much-respected colleague and indulge his fascination for Aphrodite's body-chain (in his contribution, "The Empty Hijaz").

His study, "Islamic Crosspollinations", appeared in a book of the same name, edited by him with Anna Akasoy and Peter Pormann (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007), the result of a conference held in 2004 at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

  • www.amazon.com/Islamic-Crosspollinations-Interactions-Medieval-Middle/dp/0906094550/

Other activities centre around the School of 'Abbasid Studies, which he directs with Professor Hugh Kennedy of SOAS, London, Professor Shawkat Toorawa of Cornell University and Professor John Nawas of The Catholic University of Leuven, under the secretariat of Dr Monique Bernards, of the University of Groningen.

The School runs biennial conferences, the sixth of which will be held at Exeter in 2012, in an attempt to avoid the London Olympics, and aims to provide a scholarly forum for a holistic approach to 'Abbasid history, and to foster and promote a greater awareness of the 'Abbasid dynasty (750-1258). The School publishes its proceedings on a regular basis and is comprised of some one hundred or so members. He edited the latest set of occasional papers which appeared in 2010: ‘Abbasid Studies III. Occasional Papers of the School of ‘Abbasid Studies, St Andrews 2006 and Cambridge 2010 (= a special number of Oriens 38 (2010) (Editor’s Introduction on pp. i-xv). The online version of the journal included his study of religious expression in the reigns of the early ‘Abbasid caliphs; ‘Abu Nuwas, the Justified Sinner?’ in: ‘Abbasid Studies III. Occasional Papers of the School of ‘Abbasid Studies, St Andrews 2006 and Cambridge 2010 (= a special number of Oriens 38 (2010), pp. 1-90 (Advance online publication: DOI: 10.1163/187783710X536987).

Among numerous editorial responsibilities, he is an Advisory Editor for Brill’s Third Edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, for which he served as Executive Editor for a couple of years, and the Library of Arabic Literature, a major research initiative based in New York University’s Abu Dhabi Research Institute, which aims to produce some 30 books from the classical Arabic heritage, in Arabic-English editions.

  • www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2010/10/20/nyu-press-and-nyu-abu-dhabi-announce-the-launch-of-the-library-of-arabic-literature.html

His current research students work on topics as diverse as the al-Jahiz’s texts on the Imamate, ninth century doxography, the ʿAbbasid notion of jahiliyyah, and classical hunting poetry. Previous students have completed theses on, for example, al-Biruni’s treatise on India, the Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and the epistemological status of poetry, al-Tawhidi’s theory of friendship, and al-Farabi’s classification of the sciences.

 
Publications Since 1997

Books

(As Editor) 'Abbasid Studies, Occasional Papers of the School of 'Abbasid Studies, Cambridge 6-10 July 2002, leuven: Peeters, 2004.

(As Editor): Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy. From the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank, Leuven, 2006.

(As Editor): Gregor Schoeler, The Writen and the Oral in Early Islam, London, 2006.

(As Editor, with A.Akasoy and P.Pormann), Islamic Crosspollinations: Interactions in the Medieval Middle East, Oxford, 2007.

(As Editor): Gregor Schoeler, The Biography of Muhammad, London, 2010.

(As Editor): 'Abbasid Studies III. Occasional Papers of the School of 'Abbasid Studies, St Andrews 2006 and Cambridge 2010 (=a special number of Oriens 38 (2010).

Articles

Ibn Rustah’s Lack of ‘Eloquence’, the Rus and Samanid Cosmography, in J.S. Meisami (ed.), Concepts and Practice of Eloquent Discourse in Persian and Arabic Literature, Edebiyyat, 12 (2001), 73-93.

Salvation at Sea? Seafaring in Early Arabic Poetry, in E. de Moor and G. Borg (edd.), Representations of the Divine in Arabic Poetry, Orientations, 5, Amsterdam 2001, 25-49.

Editor’s Introduction, in J.E. Montgomery (ed.) Occasional Papers of the School of ‘Abbasid Studies, Volume 5. Proceedings of the Cambridge Meeting, July 2002, Leuven: Peeters, 2004, 1-20.

Pyrrhic Scepticism and the Conquest of Disorder: Prolegomenon to the study of Ibn Fadlan, in: M. Maroth (ed.), Problems in Arabic Literature, Piliscsaba: The Avicenna Institute of Middle East Studies, 2004, 43-89.

Travelling Autopsies: Ibn Fadlan and the Bulghar, in: Middle Eastern Literatures, 7.1, (January 2004), 4-32.

Of Models and Amanuenses: The Remarks on the Qasida in Ibn Qutaybah’s Kitab al-Shi‘r wa-l-Shu‘ara’, in: R. Hoyland and P. Kennedy (edd.), Islamic Reflections, Arabic Musings. Studies in Honour of Alan Jones, Gibb Trust: Oxford, 2004, 1-47.

al-Jahiz in: S.M. Toorawa and M. Cooperson (edd.), Arabic Literary Heritage: Dictionary of Literary Biography 311, Detroit: Layman, Brucoli & Clark, 2005, 231-242.

Serendipity, Resistance and Multivalency: Ibn Khurradadhbih and his Kitab al-Masalik wa-l-Mamalik, in P.F. Kennedy, On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature, Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden, 2005, 177-230.

Jahiz’s Kitab al-Bayan wa-l-Tabyin, in: Julia Bray (ed.), Writing and Representation: Muslim Horizons, London, 2006, 91-152.

Editor’s Introduction, in: Gregor Schoeler, The Written and the Oral in Early Islam, ed. J.E. Montgomery, London, 2006, 1-27.

Beeston and the Singing-girls, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 36 (2006), 17-24.

The Empty Hijaz, in: J.E. Montgomery (ed.), Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy. From the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank, Leuven, 2006, 37-97.

Editor’s Introduction, in: J.E. Montgomery (ed.), Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy. From the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank, Leuven, 2006, 1-4.

Spectral Armies, Snakes, and a Giant from Gog and Magog: Ibn Fadlan as Eyewitness among the Volga Bulghars, The Medieval History Journal 9 (2006), 63-87.

Al-Jahiz and Hellenizing Philosophy, in C. D’Ancona (ed.), The Libraries of the Neoplatonists, Leiden, 2007, 443-456.

Islamic Crosspollinations, in A. Akasoy, P. Pormann and J.E. Montgomery (edd.), Islamic Crosspollinations, Oxford, 2007, 148-193.

Preface, A. Akasoy, P. Pormann and J.E. Montgomery (edd.), Islamic Crosspollinations, Oxford 2007, v-ix.

The Vikings in Arabic Sources, in: S. Brink and N. Price (edd.), The Viking World, Oxford and New York: Routledge 2008, pp. 550-561.

Convention as Cognition; On the Cultivation of Emotion, in: M. Hammond and G. van Gelder (edd.), Takhyīl: The Imaginary in Classical Arabic Poetics. Oxford: Gibb, 2008, pp. 147-178.

Speech and Nature: Jahiz, Bayan 2.175-207, Part 1 in: S. Toorawa and D. Stewart (edd.), Festschrift for Roger Allen. A Special Issue of Middle Eastern Literatures 11/2 (2008), pp. 169-191.

Speech and Nature: Jahiz, Bayān 2.175-207, Part 2 in: Middle Eastern Literatures 12/1 (2009), pp. 1-25.

Speech and Nature: Jahiz, Bayān 2.175-207, Part 3 in: Middle Eastern Literatures 12/2 (2009), pp. 107-125.

Speech and Nature: Jahiz, Bayān 2.175-207, Part 4 in: Middle Eastern Literatures 12/4 (2009), pp. 213-232.

Jahiz on Jest and Earnest, in: G. Tamer (ed.), Humor in der arabischen Kultur, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 209-239.

Vikings and Rus in Arabic Sources, in Living Islamic History, ed. Yasir Suleiman (Edinburgh: EUP, 2010), pp. 151-165.

Editor’s Introduction in: ‘Abbasid Studies III. Occasional Papers of the School of ‘Abbasid Studies, St Andrews 2006 and Cambridge 2010 (= a special number of Oriens 38 (2010), pp. i-xv.

Abu Nuwas, the Justified Sinner? in: ‘Abbasid Studies III. Occasional Papers of the School of ‘Abbasid Studies, St Andrews 2006 and Cambridge 2010 (= a special number of Oriens 38 (2010), pp. 1-90 (Advance online publication: DOI: 10.1163/187783710X536987).

Audio

Professor Montgomery is a regular contributer to the Radio 4 Programme, In Our Time