the legacy of henry martyn to the study of india's muslims and islam ...

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the first 'native church council' in north India a step towards achieving some agency for Indian Christians in the affairs of their new communities. In spite of his revival of controversial methods, Thomas Valpy French, the first bishop of Lahore, who consciously donned Henry Martyn's mantle as a 'missionary to Muslims' in the Middle East as well in late nineteenth century of India, valued Imad ud din highly, and encouraged his projects, allowing him scope to pursue his own vision of Indian Christian community. CONCLUSION There were a number of other late nineteenth century evangelicals, both north and Indian, who were influential north India in the late nineteenth century, and whose legacy from Henry Martyn in the encounter with Islam and with Muslims might be profitably traced. Thomas Valpy French, just British as the first bishop of Lahore, was certainly one of these, whom Martyn's late nineteenth century biographer, George Smith, considered 'the missionary bishop who most resembled Martyn character and service'. Though he started his missionary vocation in the fold of the Agra controversialists, French soon realised futility of such methods, choosing mentioned look for commonalities in religions rather than differences. Yet, despite their differences in approach, French worked with both William Muir and with Imad ud-din evangelical concerns, notably on some further fine-tuning of some of Martyn's Urdu scriptures, developing an Urdu liturgy for use worship, and on the training of an indigenous clergy from among the converts to north India. On his departure from India for Middle East, French's final meeting with Abdul Masih, in a retreat on the banks of the river Ravi, was a deeply emotional occasion, the bishop calling the convert pastor his 'spiritual in respect for their common endeavours for Muslim evangelism. Like Martyn, over seventy years earlier, French had felt called leave India for Islamic heartlands order to study Islam among Arab speaking Muslims. I unable today to bring Bishop French any closer into the picture, but I hope I have shown something of the genealogy linking evangelical brother' in Islam and Muslims the Indian environment from Henry Martyn, interest
Abdul Masih and William Muir to Imad ud din and French's generation. I am aware that I have not even touched upon the twentieth century legacy. My survey of the nineteenth century has necessarily focused controversy rather than dialogue to an extent that may seem irreconcilable with Kenneth Cragg's insightful chapter on Henry Martyn which, in exploring through 'dialogue with his own soul', made him for Cragg 'the first of modern missionaries to painful perplexity of registering the sheer otherness of faiths'.[34]Others then must look to the work of the Henry Martyn School Islamic Studies, its early work among Muslims in cities such as Aligarh, Lahore and Lucknow, and to its contemporary successor in the Hyderabad of the in order to examine how far what ways, scholarship on Islam, and contacts with Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims in the twentieth century have managed to modify the nineteenth century patterns of encounter today, the subcontinent. Notes: i[1] George Smith, Henry Martyn, Saint and Scholar: First Modern Missionary to the Mohammedans, 1781-1812 (London, 1892). in Henry Martyn, Journal, 30 Oct. 1806, J. Sargent, A Memoir of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B. D., 2nd ed. (London, 1819), p.206. i[3] Martyn to Daniel Corrie, in Samuel Wilberforce (ed)Journals and Letters of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D., 2 vols (London, 1837), II, p.74.. i[4] George Sale, The Koran; Commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed...to i[2] is prefixed a Preliminary Discourse (London, 1734). i[5] Sale, 'new edition' of The Koran, 1801, I, preface, pp. vi-vii. i[6] Martyn, Journal, 7 May, 1807; Martyn to Daniel Corrie, 29 Feb. 1808, which and Letters, II, pp.58;164. i[7] Matthews, A.N., Mishcat-ul-Masabih, 2 vols (Calcutta, 1809). i[8] Martyn, Journal, 21 March, 1805, Journals and Letters, I, pp.240-1. i[9] V. Stacey, Life of Henry Martyn (Hyderabad, 1980), p.37. Journals Ibid. i[10]
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