Muir was a
scholar of Islam. His chief area of expertise was the
history of the time of
Muhammad 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: Its rise, decline and fall, 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 1888 he delivered the
Rede lecture at
Cambridge on
The Early Caliphate and Rise of Islam. The only competing work in Britain at the time was a book by
Harrow schoolmaster
Reginald Bosworth Smith, who had no Arabic language skills. The work was also praised by Christian missionaries who welcomed it as an aid to convert Muslims. Contemporary
Aloys Sprenger also criticized Muir for ascribing Islam's origins to "the Devil". The
British Quarterly Review of 1872 criticized his approach as "he is treading ground whither the historian of events and creeds must refuse to follow him". In 1870, the Indian Muslim intellectual
Syed Ahmad Khan wrote
A Series of Essays on the Life of Mohammed, and Subjects Subsidiary Thereto, a significant rebuttal to Muir's book. Khan praised Muir's writing talent and familiarity with Oriental literature, but criticized Muir's reliance on weak sources like
al-Waqidi. He accused Muir of misrepresenting the facts and writing with animus.
W. Montgomery Watt (1961) described Muir's
Life as following "in detail the standard Muslim accounts, though not uncritically".
Mohammed Hussein Heikal regarded Muir's work as an
argumentum ad hominem fallacy.
Albert Hourani (1980) said Muir's writing, while "still not quite superseded", regarded Muhammad as "the Devil's instrument" and Muslim society as "barren and bound to remain so". Aaron W. Hughes (2012) writes that Muir's work was part of a European Orientalist tradition that sought to show that Islam was "a corruption, a garbled version of existing monotheisms". Commenting on Muir's conjecture that Muhammad may have been affected by a Satanic influence,
Clinton Bennett says that Muir "chose to resurrect another old Christian theory", and quotes the following passage from Muir's 1858
Life, vol. 2: In the final chapters of
Life, Muir concluded that the main legacy of Islam was a negative one, and he subdivided it in "three radical evils": According to
Edward Said, although Muir's
Life of Mahomet and
The Caliphate "are still considered reliable monuments of scholarship", his work was characterized by an "impressive antipathy to the Orient, Islam and the Arabs", and "his attitude towards his subject matter was fairly put by him when he said that 'the sword of Muhammed, and the Kor'an, are the most stubborn enemies of Civilisation, Liberty, and the Truth which the world has yet known'".
Daniel Martin Varisco rejects Said's assessment that Muir's
Life was considered reliable by the 1970s. He writes "Serious historians had long since relegated Muir's work to the rare-books sections of their libraries."
Other works Muir's later
Annals was received with fewer reservations by the
Times reviewer and other newspapers of the day. It was the
Annals that established Muir's reputation as a leading scholar on Islam in Britain. Nevertheless, his earlier hypercritical
Life of Mahomet was used as a poster child by contemporary Muslim commentators—especially by Indian ones connected to the movement of
Syed Ahmed Khan—to dismiss all criticism of their society emanating from Western scholars. An illustrative aspect in the evolution of Muir's positions is his stance on the
Crusades. In his writings of the 1840s, he goaded Christian scholars to verbal warfare against Muslims using aggressive crusader imagery. Fifty year later, Muir redirected the invective hitherto reserved for the Muslims to the crusading leaders and armies, and while still finding some faults with the former, he praised
Saladin for knightly values. (Muir's anti-Catholic animus may have played a role in this too.) Despite his later writings, Muir's reputation as an unfair critic of Islam remained strong in Muslim circles. Powell finds that William Muir deserves much of the criticism laid by
Edward Said and his followers against 19th-century Western scholarship on Islam. Muir was a committed
Evangelical Christian and was invited to preface many missionary biographies and memoirs, speak at conferences and to publicise
Zenana missions. He wrote "If Christianity is anything, it must be everything. It cannot brook a rival, nor cease to wage war against all other faiths, without losing its strength and virtue." In his official capacity as principal of Edinburgh University, Muir chaired many meetings of Evangelists at the university, organised to support overseas missionary efforts, and addressed by speakers such as
Henry Drummond. In India, William Muir founded the
Indian Christian village
Muirabad, near
Allahabad. Muir was impressed with the discovery of the
Apology of al-Kindy; he lectured on it at the Royal Asiatic Society, presenting it as an important link in what he saw as a chain of notable conversions to Christianity, and later he published the translated sources. A proselytising text,
Bakoorah shahiya (
Sweet First Fruits) was published under his name as well, but this work had actually been written by a convert to Protestantism from
Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
Daniel Pipes investigated the origin of the phrase "
Satanic Verses", and concluded that despite
Salman Rushdie's claim that he had borrowed the phrase from
Tabari, the earliest traceable occurrence is in Muir's
Life of Mohamet (1858) in a passage discussing "two Satanic verses". However, the phrase does not appear in the revised edition of 1912. ==Statuary==