SIR

See also:

• WILLIAM
• WILLIAM (1143-1214)
• WILLIAM (1227-1256)
• WILLIAM (1J33-1584)
• WILLIAM (A.S. Wilhelm, O. Norse Vilhidlmr; O. H. Ger. Willahelm, Willahalm, M. H. Ger. Willehelm, Willehalm, Mod.Ger. Wilhelm; Du. Willem; O. Fr. Villalme, Mod. Fr. Guillaume; from " will," Goth. vilja, and " helm," Goth. hilms, Old Norse hidlmr, meaning
• WILLIAM (c. 1130-C. 1190)
• WILLIAM, 13TH

WILLIAM

See also:

• MUIR, JOHN (1810-1882)
• SIR WILLIAM MUIR (1819-1905)

MUIR (1819-1905)  , Scottish Orientalist, brother of the preceding, was born at Glasgow on the 27th of April 1819 . He was educated at Kilmarnock Academy, at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, and at Haileybury College, and in 1837 entered the Bengal Civil Service . He served as secretary to the governor of the North-West Provinces, and as a member of the Agra revenue board, and during the Mutiny he was in charge of the intelligence department there . In 1865 he was made foreign secretary to the Indian Government . In 1867 he was knighted (K.C.S.I.), and in 1868 he became lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces . In 1874 he was appointed financial member of the Council, and retired in 1876, when he became a member of the Council of India in London . He had always taken an interest in educational matters, and it was chiefly through his exertions that the central college at Allahabad, known as Muir's College, was built and endowed . In 1885 he was elected principal of Edinburgh University in succession to Sir Alexander Grant, and held the post till 1903, when he retired . Sir William Njuir was a profound Arabic scholar, and made a careful study of the history of the time of Mahomet and the early caliphate . His chief books are a Life of Mahomet and History of Islam to the Era of the Hegira; Annals of the Early Caliphate; The Caliphate, an abridgment and continuation of the Annals, which brings the record down to the fall of the caliphate on the onset of the Mongols; The Koran: its Composition and Teaching; and The Mohammedan Controversy, a reprint of five essays published at intervals between 1885 and 1887 . In 1881 he delivered the Rede lecture at Cambridge on The Early Caliphate and Rise of Islam . He married in 1840 Elizabeth Huntly Wemyss (d .

1897), and had five sons and six daughters; four of his sons served in India, and one of them,

Colonel A . N . Muir (d . 1899), was acting resident in Nepal . MUKADDASI' [the appellation of Shams ad Din Abu Abdallah Mahommed ibn Abmad] (/t . 967985), Arabian traveller, author of a Description of the Lands of Islam which is the most original and among the most important of Arabic geographies of the middle ages . His family name was Al Bashari . His paternal grandfather was an architect who constructed many public works in Palestine, especially at Acre, and his mother's family was opulent . His maternal grandfather, a man of artistic and literary tastes, migrated to Jerusalem from Jurjan province in Persia, near the frontier of Khorasan . His descriptions rest on extensive travels through a long series of years . His first pilgrimage was made at the age of twenty (in A.H . 356=A.D .

967), but his

book was not published till A.H . 375 (A.D . 985-986), when he was forty years old . The two MSS . (at Berlin and Constantinople) represent a later recension (A.H . 378) . The book became known in Europe through the copy brought from India by Sprenger, and was edited by Professor M . J. de Goeje as the third part of his Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum (Leiden, 1877) . See also the English translation (unfinished) by G . S . A . Ranking and R .

F . Azoo, in Bibliothech Indica, New Series, Nos . 899, 952, 1001 (Bengal

Asiatic Society, 1897–1901); Mulcaddasi's Syrian chapter has been separately translated and edited in English by Guy le Strange (London, Pales-tine Pilgrims Text Society, 1886); in German by J.Gildemeister in Zeitschrift des deutschen Palestina-Vereins, vol. vii . (1884) .