The History of the Saracens

Simon Ockley, vicar of Swavesey, Cambridgeshire, devoted himself from an early age to the study of eastern languages and customs and was appointed Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic at Cambridge in 1711. The first volume of his work generally known as The History of the Saracens, appeared in 1708 as Conquest of Syria, Persia, and Egypt by the Saracens, the second in 1718, with an introduction dated from Cambridge Castle, where he was then imprisoned for debt. Edward Gibbon, who admired and used his work, speaks of his fate as "unworthy of the man and of his country." ==Contents==

Ockley's History extends from the death of Mahomet in 632, to that of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan in 705; the work was left unfinished due to the author's death in 1720. The Life of Mohammed prefixed to the third edition of his History, which was issued for the benefit of his destitute daughter in 1757, is by Roger Long. ==Reputation and influence of the work==

Ockley based his work on an Arabic manuscript in the Bodleian Library which later scholars have pronounced less trustworthy than he imagined it to be. Stanley Lane-Poole in the Dictionary of National Biography wrote that: citing the opinion of William Robertson Smith in the article on Ockley from the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The author in question is now known as pseudo-Waqidi. Lane-Poole notes that the History Alfred Rayney Waller described the author's work: The 1720 play The Siege of Damascus by John Hughes drew inspiration from the first volume of the work. == References ==