Professor Hugh Goddard, University of Edinburgh

Among British writers on Islam in the twentieth century, Montgomery Watt was exceptional, partly because of the range of his interests and the prolific volume of his publications, but more particularly because of the originality with which he approached certain crucial aspects of Islam, particularly the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The fact that his three main volumes on this topic, Muhammad at Mecca, first published by Oxford University Press in 1953, Muhammad at Medina (1956), and then Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman (1961), essentially a one-volume abridgement of the other two, have been kept more or less continually in print by OUP, the first two by OUP Pakistan, is perhaps the most fitting testimony to both the originality and the accessibility of his works.

Watt was born in Fife in 1909 and, like Muhammad, grew up as an orphan, his father, a Presbyterian minister, having died not long after his birth. His schooling was at George Watson's College in Edinburgh, and he went on to study Classics at the University of Edinburgh and then Greats at Balliol College, Oxford, before returning to the University of Edinburgh to teach moral philosophy from 1934–8. It was round about this time that two encounters which were to influence the whole of his subsequent career took place: firstly, following his mother's death, he took in a lodger who was an Ahmadi Muslim, Khwaja Abdul Mannan, and their conversations over breakfast and dinner evidently stimulated his interest in the faith and world of Islam; and secondly, he heard that the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, Graham Brown, was looking for someone to work as his academic adviser on Muslim–Christian relations. Watt, who had been ordained in the Episcopal Church of Scotland in 1939, applied and was accepted. He studied Arabic in London, while serving as a curate in St Mary’s, The Boltons, and then returned to Edinburgh to study under Richard Bell, the translator and commentator on the Qur’an, for his PhD, which was completed in 1943 on the theme of ‘Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam’.