REYNOLD Alleyne Nicholson was a distinguished orientalist and scholar of Islamic literature. Born on Aug 18, 1868, at Keighley, Yorkshire, England, Nicholson inherited Persian and Arabic manuscripts from his grandfather who was a scholar of Gospels. With a deep interest in mysticism, Reynold A. Nicholson studied Sufi poetry and for a fellowship dissertation he translated from Persian into English Jalaluddin Rumi’s ghazals with Sufi themes and presented them with annotations and an introduction. He published it in 1898 under the title Selected Poems from Divan of Shams-i-Tabriz. This made him quite prominent among the scholars of eastern and Islamic literatures.

Nicholson taught Persian and Arabic at Cambridge University. Often dubbed one of the greatest authorities on Islamic mysticism, Nicholson is known for some of his remarkable works, especially a critical edition of Jalaluddin Rumi’s Masnavi-i-Ma’anavi — with translation and commentary — in eight volumes (1925-1940). Nicholson knew several Eastern languages and translated mystical texts from Arabic and Persian into English. Some of his other works are Literary History of the Arabs (1907), The Mystics of Islam (1914), Studies in Islamic Mysticism (1921), Sufism: The Mysticism of Islam, The Idea of Personality in Sufism (1923), Studies in Islamic Poetry, The Tarjuman-ul-Ashwaq: A Selection of Mystical Odes (1911), which is a translation of Ibn-i-Arabi’s poetry.

Nicholson also translated into English Kashful Mahjoob, or Revelation of Mystery (1911). Penned in 11th century by Hazrat Ali Bin Usman Hajveri, also known as Data Ganj Bakhsh, Kashful Mahjoob is a remarkable and the oldest Persian treatise on Sufism. Its manuscripts are preserved in some European libraries and it has been translated into several languages. Though Nicholson made a couple of strange mistake in Kashful Mahjoob’s English translation, as mentioned by Dr Tehseen Firaqi in his article on Nicholson’s translation, it is otherwise a commendable work.

Another notable work by Reynold A. Nicholson is his translation of Iqbal’s Persian masnavi Asrar-i-Khudi. Nicholson was the first European to have translated any work of Allama Iqbal. Nicholson’s English translation of Asrar-i-Khudi (1915), titled The Secrets of Self, was first published from London in 1920. Nicholson had met Iqbal during Iqbal’s student days at Cambridge. Nicholson was also one of the examiners of Iqbal’s dissertation at Cambridge in 1907. In the introduction to Asrar-i-Khudi’s translation, Nicholson wrote “The Asrar-i-Khudi was first published from Lahore in 1915. I read it soon afterwards and thought so highly of it that I wrote to Iqbal, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Cambridge some fifteen years ago, asking his leave to prepare an English translation. My proposal was cordially accepted.”

Nicholson further wrote that “to the European reader the Asrar-i-Khudi presents certain obscurities which no translation can entirely remove. These lie partly in the form and would not be felt, as a rule, by any one conversant with Persian poetry. Often, however, the ideas themselves, being associated with peculiarly oriental ways of thinking, are hard for our minds to follow. I am not sure that I have always grasped the meaning or rendered it correctly; but I hope that such errors are few, thanks to the assistance so kindly given me by my friend Muhammad Shafi, now professor of Arabic at Lahore”.

Not only did Moulvi Muhammad Shafi, prof, Punjab University Oriental College, help Nicholson, but Iqbal himself helped by explaining the basic philosophy behind Asrar-i-Khudi. As Nicholson admits “other questions of a more fundamental character have been solved by the author himself. At my request he drew up a statement of his philosophical views on the problems touched and suggested in the book”. Then Nicholson reproduced Iqbal’s note, which, according to Iqbal, was written “in a great hurry”, but Nicholson wrote about the note that “apart from its power and originality it elucidates the poetical argument far better than any explanation that could have been offered by me”.

Nicholson’s translation helped Iqbal’s message reach a wider audience and invoked interest beyond the subcontinent. However, contrary to Nicholson’s hopes, the errors were not few and Iqbal corrected the mistakes in his own hand writing on a published copy of the book and then sent it to Nicholson. Nicholson admitted almost all of the lapses and in the second edition, published in 1940, corrected them, though did not mention it in the foreword. Dr Saeed Akhter Durrani, a scientist of Pakistan origin and a scholar of Iqbal, settled in the UK, discovered at Cambridge University’s Oriental Faculty the copy of Asrar-i-Khudi’s translation that had corrections marked in Iqbal’s hand writing. There were about 150 corrections that Iqbal had made. A facsimile of the corrected version was published by Karachi University in 2002 with Durrani’s intro.

Reynold A. Nicholson died in Chester on Aug 27, 1945. Nicholson exerted a profound influence on studies of Islamic mysticism and Sufi literature.

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Published in Dawn, August 26th, 2024