Sir William Jones and Oriental Mysticism

Oriental mysticism, religion, and science are all intertwined with literature; while proven to be fantastic for many scholars, this intermixture has made it challenging to extract mystical concepts from poetry. This difficulty has been one of the earliest sources of conflict between Oriental literary scholars, religious figures, and mystics. The situation becomes more complex should one attempt to compare Oriental mysticism with its Occidental counterpart. Arguably, the first Western scholar who conducted such a rigorous comparison was Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a linguist, translator, and poet who was also a Supreme Court Judge in Calcutta. His fascination with Persian mystical poets such as Rumi (1210-1273), Sadi (1210-1292), and Hafez (1315-1390) drove him towards Sufism. Due to his understanding of Persian mysticism and culture, Jones became one of the best interpreters of Indo-Persian literature. His works, founded on his fascination with Persian language and literature, gained him the title of ‘Persian Jones’ and established his international reputation as an Orientalist. Jones’s publications highly impacted Romantic scholars, developing sympathetic representations of the Orient in the period’s literature. Jones’s works, letters, Persian manuscripts, and the annotations he made on them have not been examined for his Persian mystical studies before this thesis. Therefore, this PhD research will investigate his works and library on Sufism and his comparative study of mystical schools. It intends to analyse Jones’s findings in his comparative mystical studies and elaborate on his understanding of Sufism. This thesis investigates his essays, letters, and annotations in various texts; such texts are mainly available in the Royal Asiatic Society archives and the British Library’s India Office Records and Private Papers. Moreover, in some cases, Jones has altered his English translations of Persianate Sufi texts; these alterations will be examined and compared with the original texts to demonstrate Jones’s rationale behind them. This research will pursue the accuracy of Jones’s interpretation of Sufism and Hinduism. In addition, it examines his development of the interpretations of Oriental mysticism, which he presented to eighteenth-century Europe. The findings of this research will contribute to the growing literature on Orientalism and shed a brighter light on the works of Sir William Jones and Indo-Persian literature and mysticism.

Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century America

During the nineteenth century, Americans encountered Asia through a number of exchanges. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, this chapter surveys the development of American Orientalism across three areas: academic Orientalism, representative Orientalism, and Orientalist discourses of power. Academic Orientalism first developed in the United States as the work of British Orientalists in India filtered into the country. Later, Americans such as William D. Whitney placed American Orientalism on par with its European competitors. Meanwhile, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, imagined Asia as a land of Oriental mysticism and contemplation in contrast to American materialism and reason. Finally, the World’s Parliament of Religion in 1893 used representations of the Orient to bolster claims of American cultural supremacy. Through all of these examples, Orientalism collapsed the line between religion and race such that the Orient always represented racial and religious inferiority to white Christian America.