The Love of Strangers

As twenty-first century, multicultural, modern London recently celebrated the inauguration of its Muslim mayor-elect, Sadiq Khan, MP, as the UK’s first Muslim Mayor of London and a manifestation of the country’s enlightened, racial tolerance, the book under review traces the arrival, trails and tribulations of a group of visiting Muslims from Iran to the then imperial metropolis, almost exactly two hundred years ago. Nile Green’s fascinating enquiry into the fate of six Iranian Muslim students on their rihlat al-‘ilm, in search of ‘ilm al-jadid (“new sciences”), is set against a background of the gentility and pomp of Jane Austin’s fictional representations of Regency London’s high society and the realpolitik of the Anglo-Iran Treaty of 1812. The physical proximity and social interactions and experiences of the Muslim students is remarkably coincidental to Austen’s novels (the students’ chaperone and patron was aptly named, ‘Mr [Capt.] D’Arcy’) and thus provides a suitable historicocultural framework in which to contextualise and assess the progress of these nineteenth-century oriental ‘others’ in Britain’s then imperial capital. In addition to the Austenarian setting, the monograph offers us an eidetic vision into the student’s fortunes through the diary accounts of one of them. The author’s employment of contrasting and comparing both ‘outsider’ (Austin’s) and ‘insider’ (Mirza Salih’s) accounts results in both synthesis and dichotomy, in between which Green repeatedly attempts to understand and elucidate the varied encounters of the Muslim students..