Introduction

Professor William Montgomery Watt was a remarkable figure in the field of Islamic Studies who spent almost all his long career at the University of Edinburgh. As the first Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies there, he gave his inaugural lecture, entitled ‘Islamic Studies in Scotland: Retrospect and Prospect’, on 21 October 1965. In his long lifetime, Professor Watt was probably the foremost Western non-Muslim interpreter of Islam, and he was a much-revered name for many Muslims all over the world. He died, aged ninety-seven, on 24 October 2006. Those who have worked or continue to work as scholars of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Edinburgh – and they are an increasing number – have not forgotten his considerable achievements.

This chapter will be in two parts: firstly, it will give some insights into Professor Watt as a person, and secondly it will discuss his scholarly career. The information and reflections about him provided here have drawn on his published writings, on personal recollections of him gathered over a period spanning more than thirty years, and on the contents of an unpublished book of his, partly a kind of ‘autobiography’, called ‘The Testament of a Search’.

An Account of Professor Watt's Life

William Montgomery Watt was born in 1909 in a small village in Fife called Ceres. His father, who was the Church of Scotland minister there, died when William was only fourteen months old, leaving his mother, aged thirty-nine, a widow and him an only child. They moved to Edinburgh where there were other family members. In 1919 William went to George Watson's College. There his headmaster persuaded him to study Classics, on the grounds that when he applied for a university place there would be more available scholarships in this subject for impecunious applicants. William reluctantly agreed; he writes in his unpublished autobiography: